Getting the Bird, Part 2: Lead and Modernism

In the Sherlock Holmes stories “The Blue Carbuncle” and “The Six Napoleons”, Holmes searches for something valuable lost or hidden in something mundane. In “Carbuncle,” it's the eponymous gem ingested by a turkey after being stolen (the gem, not the turkey), and for “Napoleons”, it's, again, a stolen precious stone, the Pearl of the Borgias, hidden in a bust of Napoleon after being stolen. Both stories require Holmes and Watson to traipse around London to trace the mysterious appearance of the Carbuncle and why busts of Napoleon were being stolen and destroyed. In both situations, the missing gem is recovered and returned.

The Falcon falls into a similar situation: something seemingly mundane hides something of greater worth, but, rather than precious gems, the falcon is just black enamel over a lead statue. In this regard, the Falcon is less like the the Blue Carbuncle or the Black Pearl of the Borgias and more like Jay Gatsby: a facade hiding something less desirable.

Not all modernist fiction is about misdirection, but a major facet of it is writing designed to obfuscate the reader's own ability to read. Without going into too much detail, modern fiction forces us to realize things aren't always as clear and easy as they seem. Perhaps Hemingway and his bleaker narratives about war typified this the most: the world isn't so easy to categorize or understand and the happy endings we want aren't what we get. This wasn't a time for the beauty of romanticism or the idealism of enlightenment thinking, and the jingoism of colonialism that marked so much of Holmes. It was a time for the harsh realities of life and reevaluating what we had believed. A fine beginning for the century to follow, filled with overturned idealisms and the exposure of the failures and brutalities of life and history.

There isn't always a Sherlock Holmes to right all the wrongs we face. They can hide or don't even understand the oppressive systems their reinforce.

We don't all end up well off like Philip “Pip” Pirrip or Oliver Twist or Jane Eyre. It's harder to move up the social ladder, and harder still to have someone else pay for it.

We don't all get to marry our Mr. Darcys. Sometimes their mansions are funded by bootlegging.

And what better way to represent that than with the Maltese Falcon? An item centuries old made of gems and gold, stemming from royalty, but available to whoever is able to get their hands on it? European aristocratic notions of wealth and superiority and status mixed with American opportunism, the desire to rise to power and eminence: to rival the old families who oversaw their ancestors. And once it's in our possession, the years of toil and effort we've invested in it suddenly seem worth it, right up until we scratch at the surface to go beyond the glossy enamel to the dull lead of reality. No shine, no glimmer.

This is where Spade, again, sets himself apart from Gutman, Cairo, and O'Shaugnessey, and, ironically, aligns him with the violent Wilmer Cook. Gutman and Cairo think they can continue their search for the Falcon and O'Shaugnessey thinks she'll be safe with Spade. Spade even confesses he may love her. Their optimism, their preconceived notions of a better tomorrow makes them romantics, not realists. Spade is a realist and Wilmer, certainly when he's made the fall guy, has realism thrust on him.

Spade, like Modernism, has his suspicion that things aren't as pure and as simple as they seem. Not every ending has a silver lining. Instead, they have the dead weight of lead.

Getting The Bird, Part 1: The Anti-Climax

The Maltese Falcon focuses on the eponymous statue of a black bird, described by Gutman as having an enamel overlay atop gold and gems in the shape of a falcon. However, when Spade, Gutman, Brigid, Cairo, and Wilmer are all together and the bird's enamel is tested by Gutman's knife, they discover it to be a fake, presumably prepared and planted for them by the previous owner.

It's an anti-climactic end. After everything else that occurs in the novel, at least three murders and the destruction of a ship, on top of whatever Gutman and his gang did to swindle it in the first place, the statue is simply lead and enamel, it's disappointing. Gutman laughs it off and characterizes the disappointment as merely another step in his years of seeking the falcon and he and whoever will join him (with an invitation to Spade) will continue seeking it. Gutman assumes the Russian general, Kemidov, they stole the bird from produced a fake to throw them off, not thinking, in the Falcon's long, tortured history, it might be the statue Kemidov had, himself falsely believing it was the real falcon (if so, then why he never removed the enamel is never addressed), or even that this statue is the statute in question, either the one that had always existed or something around which stories had grown and evolved. Either way, Gutman sees himself as the next to possess the bird, even if it seems he doesn't see far enough to understand he'll just be another piece of its history.

But Gutman isn't the protagonist: Spade is. It's easy to forget it's not about finding the falcon but about Spade maintaining his own professional integrity and clearing any doubt about his own innocence regarding Archer's murder. Refocusing our attention on Spade means seeing the revelation of Archer's murderer, a successful identification, as the climax rather than discovering the falcon is a fake.

But that's not as interesting.

The falcon is what's interesting, with its mystique, singularity, and value. Having the falcon means having a piece of history. It's value can be considered in the materials that went into its construction, the artful craftsmanship that brought them together, and the long, sordid past that has seen it hidden. But, as addressed, this isn't the falcon we get at the novel's end. What we do get is, well, worthless.

What would it mean if Gutman obtained the real falcon? For Spade, a payout and having to keep quiet, or still turn them over, but then have to deal with the real falcon. That would be an entirely different story, and likely not one Spade would be interested in (finding the bird means finding Archer's killer, after all: Spade has to deal with Iva next, not statuary). What's more, it would represent, for Gutman, a success after years of searching and whatever nefarious acts he was engaged in, validating crime. Villains victorious, even if they are arrested, and that's not how detective novels end. That story would need to focus on Gutman, not Spade. Spade's role as protagonist almost guarantees Gutman's capture and his loss of the falcon.

What, then, does the false bird represent?

I would argue, something more significant than the false one. As something mundane but believed to be worthwhile, a sad truth where one expects a great treasure, it's possible to see the falcon as representative of those changes, that shift to modernism, that helped mark Hammett's fiction as so different from Doyle's.

What influenced Modernism: Detective Fiction Post-War

Dashiell Hammett's being an American and a Pinkerton detective weren't the only reasons he became a successful author with a style so distinct from Doyle's. A lot can happen over a span of 40 years; namely, the first world war, and the stock market crash.

When Doyle wrote A Study in Scarlet, such social threats were far away. The bigger threats were more protecting Britain from outside influences and maintaining an empire. A Study in Scarlet was, after all, about villains from the western United States coming to London where they would face justice. This is not an uncommon trait in Holmes stories: threats come from afar, either foreign individuals or Britains corrupted by what is foreign. For Doyle and Imperial Britain, life was great because it had remained steady for decades and centuries. What need was there for concern? It's little wonder that Holmes complained of Watson romanticizing their adventures.

And then came World War I. The Great War brought conflict and devastation to Europe, and left an artistic reevaluation in its wake. Pretty much every aspect of the arts underwent some kind of change, and while each one was certainly different, the common trend was experimentation. It was as if there had been a constant undercurrent that the arts were good and beneficial, and they made people and the world better. And yet, if so, how could the world come to such strife? Suddenly, the optimism and social progression that fueled authors like Doyle and Dickens were gone. Even Jane Austen (a century earlier) wrote during a time of war, but it was distant, especially to the gentry Austen wrote about. It's almost easy to read Persuasion and forget why Frederick Wentworth had money when he didn't years before, and Pride and Prejudice features soldiers but only uses the word “War” once to describe the War Office, and not the Napoleonic Wars.

World War I made the world a much smaller, harsher place.

In literature, the post-war period was dominated by “modernism,” a period of experimentation and more interest on the psychologies of individuals as they dealt with the world around them: literature turned inward, on who someone is and why they think as they do. Even though modernism's roots predate the war, this conflict shaped the lives and minds of those who lived through and fought in it, culminating in the “lost generation”: a post war generation trying to come to terms with the war, and whatever reprieve was made by the Roaring Twenties was on its way out with the Stock Market crash of 1929. The Maltese Falcon was published around that time, with, I wonder, some of the same cynicism that undercuts The Great Gatsby: an understanding that the current lifestyle of wealth and extravagance was, like Gatsby, problematic and doomed.

In a world that had come back from a serious war and on the precipice of financial ruin, artists were trying to make sense of it, to figure out how they should act, respond, and understand the world. From this time, we gained such great authors as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, who showed the Imperial stability Doyle enjoyed was gone, and modernism tried to reconcile an unstable world.

Where then does Dashiell Hammett and the authors of hard boiled detective fiction fit into this?

As far as I can tell, Hammett's never been classified as a modernist writer or a representative of the lost generation. He wrote pulp fiction: not the experimental works of Joyce or the human analyses of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and much of Hammett’s oeuvre came after many major modernist works were published. I'm not trying to reclaim him or elevate him to their levels, but that doesn't mean his work and the crime fiction authors who would populate the pulp fiction shelves didn't come out of this same era of international conflict and personal strife. Just like the modernists, these authors give us other ways to look at the responses to the world that had to deal with a mass-scale human conflict, the stock market crash, and social issues that couldn’t be ignored.