Frames, Honesty, and The Maltese Falcon

Most detective stories start out in a similar fashion: a client goes to the detective and enlists their help resolving a mystery or righting some wrong. The Maltese Falcon is no different. It opens with Ms. Wonderly hiring Spade & Archer to help her find her sister who has run off with a man named Floyd Thursby. She pays them generously for their work, generously enough, that Spade doesn’t believe her story.

This places Spade at a disadvantage: as a detective, he’s supposed to fill in the gaps, to complete incomplete narratives. If a detective were told a complete story, there'd be little need for them. In this respect, detective fiction owes something to frame narration.

However, in most frame narratives, there will be a chapter or so introducing the main narrative, only returning to that frame at the very end. Detective fiction takes this and puts it in a blender; or shoots the frame up with a tommy gun would be better. There are two main reasons for this: the first is the presence of many narratives within the main narrative for the detective to sift through, and the second is, like Ms. Wonderly, not everyone is honest.

Narrative Framing: As a detective detects, they seek out clues and witnesses, gathering information from them. The characters that populate a detective story will have different perspectives and experiences that relate to the case, and they will have different things to say and share. It's from these bits and pieces the detective solves the case. Detective fiction is therefore about narrative and narrative construction: it's a story of someone figuring out what really happened and then presenting it to the people involved at the end. Each time they speak with someone and get more information, they'll get a different frame and they need to figure out just how it fits with the main narrative, like a puzzle piece, and lob off whatever is unnecessary.

Character Honesty: Of course, most detective fiction relies on someone doing something dishonest or deceitful. If everyone was perfectly honest about everything, the detective would be obsolete. People don't like admitting to stealing, murder, or any number of other malfeasance, so it's up to the detective to find out who is lying, who is telling the truth. The separate fact from fiction and extrapolate the truth when people actively try to keep them from it.

Returning briefly to Sherlock Holmes stories, It's pretty much taken for granted that the clients tell the truth. They give Holmes a reliable piece of the puzzle immediately. However, in a post-war, cynical era where the author had professional detecting experience and was therefore probably lied to on a regular basis (I bet detectives get lied to much more often than physicians, or at least they'd be more serious lies), it stands to reason more people are going to lie, including those you’re supposed to trust.

Enter the characters of The Maltese Falcon, where the kinship and trust you had for Sherlock Holmes gets left in another century. Now, we have people who lie, cheat, steal, deceive, and it isn't clear what their motivations are: it could be business or pleasure, for personal gain or social justice. They fluctuate based on their needs to avoid bad situations, to get out of a dangerous spots with as little injury as possible to their pride and their bodies. And people get killed.

So, with The Maltese Falcon, we leave a world of black and white morality and enter a much grayer one.

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Works Cited

Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. New York: Vintage Books, 1972. Print. 

The Social Anxieties of Crime and Detective Fiction

As discussed elsewhere in this blog, fiction is thematic. This is particularly true when dealing with detective and crime fiction because it deals with physical, emotional, and social anxieties. We'd rather see the world, our homes, and our lives as safe, and place the dangers of the modern world at a distance. News does this for us: all the bad things happen somewhere else and to someone else. Detective and crime fiction is a safe way to invite these ideas into our homes and see a safe resolution.

The expectation in crime and detective fiction is simple: something has gone wrong and must be set right. Whether it be theft, violence, scandal, blackmail, or murder, the truth is sought, the wrong party brought to justice and amends made to the victims to return the world to a pre-crisis balance. Each possible crime represents more than itself: murder is a threat to the sanctity of life, theft to property, blackmail to privacy. When we see these crimes in fiction it’s an opportunity to explore the significance of these social ills. Even if it is just a little bit, we get to feel anxious about our own life, property, privacy, etc. Thankfully, the detective represents the social order, through their efforts to discover the evil and set it right.

Take the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” This story focuses on a young woman, Helen Stoner, who fears her life is being threatened by her stepfather, Sir Grimsby Roylott, because her sister died shortly before the sister’s marriage. Roylott is a violent man who keeps a menagerie of exotic animals, and keeps his stepdaughter's bed mounted in a room, so it cannot be moved. Holmes and Watson hide in Helen's room and discover a poisonous snake let into her room. They beat it back, and the snake attacks and kills Roylott himself, giving the story some poetic justice.

Roylott represents a threat to Victorian standards with his violent temper and exotic menagerie: hardly a respectable British gentleman. His step-daughter, not of his historically hot-tempered aristocracy, represents Victorian ideals of womanhood: she is innocent and needs protection, which appears in the form of Holmes. The violent, exotic Roylott not only poses a threat to his daughter but to Victorian decorum, womanhood, and fatherhood, in the name of claiming her inheritance. Holmes comes and fulfills the role of paternal protector, performing the social roles Roylott has abandoned. So this is not simply a crime story about violent men, damsels in distress, and exotic animals, but it's a story about foreign threats and influences, and familial duty, with Holmes to fill the gaps.

The villain represents threats to the social order while the victims represent what is good and wholesome and the detective returns the world to a positive situation.

This means when looking at crime and detective fiction, it is important to consider what the crime and villain represent thematically. To explore this idea, I'm going to take a few blog posts looking at how the classic, archetypal detective Sherlock Holmes deals with some of the major crimes and villains he faces, and, perhaps a few other pieces of crime fiction.

To begin, I will look at the three most famous of Holmes villains: Irene Adler, Professor Moriarty, and Charles Augustus Milverton. Adler is famous because she is the woman who beat him, Moriarty because he is “the Napoleon of crime” Holmes' arch-nemesis, and Milverton with the use of information for personal gain.