Violent, Young, and Lost: Wilmer Cook

Far from the soft, sweet, cooing of Brigid O'Shaughnessey, we have Wilmer Cook, one of Gutman's little gang. It can be easy to lump these characters together because of the novel's homosexual subtext around them, or to forget about Wilmer because he doesn't do as much as Joel. Joel Cairo visits Spade's office and holds him at gunpoint and searches his room, whereas Wilmer, perpetually known as “the boy” lingers off to the side, waiting for his chance to be violent.

Wilmer Cook isn’t just violent. He’s the most violent character in the novel. He is blamed for Thursby's murder, and it's believable given his tendency to skulk around with guns in his pockets, stalks Spade, later kicks a drugged Spade in the forehead, and may be responsible for searching some personal rooms. He is also verbally abrasive. The first conversation between Spade and Cook in a hotel lobby, features this comment on Cook's vocabulary: “The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second, 'you'”, and later, when approached by the hotel detective, Luke, Cook simply says, “I won't forget you guys” (98), a cool statement laced with pent frustration, ready to lash out. Cook is violent. Whether it's a violation of one's physical well being or one's own space and security, it's his way of accomplishing things.

However, we can't just call Wilmer the novel's embodiment of violence. He bears another significant trait: his youth, and, by extension, inexperience. He is almost always “the boy” even after his name is revealed. When he takes Spade to see Gutman, Spade manages to get his precious guns from him and Spade remarks to Gutman, “a crippled newsie took them away from him, but I got them back” (126), insulting Cook's ability. His age is never given, nor is there any exposition to explain his behavior. He could be a teenager, whereas the actors who played him were 38 (Elisha Cook in 1941) and 32 (Dwight Frye in 1931), about as old as Spade himself (7). There's no suggestion he's any blood relation to Gutman (who has a daughter, Rhea, who is mentioned in passing and makes one appearance), or any other characters. It seems he came to San Francisco from New York as part of Gutman's party, but it isn't clear if he was in Europe or Russia before Brigid teamed up with Floyd Thursby to steal the falcon. Cook is vague.

There are some problems in interpreting vague characters. We only have so much to go off of in figuring them out, which means a lot of possibility without much certainty.

For example, Cook could be a product, directly or indirectly, of the Great War, a conflict that turned the world itself violent and detached from its past, struggling in the “modern” world. He could be a veteran of the Great War (If so, I'd expect him to put up more of a fight to Spade) or maybe he's younger and lost his parents in the war or to the 1918 influenza pandemic, making him a long-time orphan who turned to crime and was picked up by Gutman to do the violence Gutman wasn't willing to do himself. Or maybe he's a runaway, or the child of equally violent parents.

Or maybe he's just there because the story needs him. Cook does, after all, fulfill the role of scapegoat late in the novel to benefit more prominent characters. Much of what Wilmer does to otherwise advance the story could have been handled by Joel Cairo. If so, then Hammett endowed him with more unsavory traits to make him unsympathetic. Less a character than a prop. No symbolism, no deeper significance, just an unsympathetic character to get thrown under the proverbial bus.

Wilmer Cook reminds us of an issue we encounter in studying literature all the time: we can't always be certain. Cook could be a reflection on what Gertrude Stein called “the lost generation,” a disoriented youth in a tattered, war-torn world, or he could be a part of the setting, moved from background to fore and endowed with action to fulfill narrative purposes. It's possible to read him either way, and neither reading, while very different, is necessarily wrong.

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Works Cited

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

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.