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. 

Don't trust the Siren's Song: Brigid O'Shaughnessy

When The Maltese Falcon opens, Ms. Wonderly is seeking help from Spade & Archer. Later, Ms. Leblanc moves into a new hotel because hers was broken into, and then Brigid O'Shaughnessy, on several occasions, pleads with Sam Spade to help her. All of these names apply to the same character, who, once she’s known as Brigid, remains Brigid. She uses these aliases to move around and deceive people, so she can, as needs be, appear scared and flighty, weak, and in need of help. These pleas are her siren's song.

In Greek mythology, the sirens were bird-like creatures who would sing their songs to lure sailors to their island, where the sirens would eat them. The myths tell us nothing of the nature of their song, but It's easy to imagine the siren song as sensual, alluring, and seductive. After all, sailors would hurl themselves from their boats despite the bleached skulls on the shore. Odysseus, in the Odyssey, plugged his men's ears with wax and had himself lashed to the mast as they went by so the men would not be tempted but still hear. He wanted to hear and survive what could be so alluring and dangerous.

Using the myth of the sirens, Margaret Atwood offers an interesting interpretation In her poem “Siren Song”. Atwood presents the siren song as a plea for help. It isn't about the seductress who entices, but the seemingly innocent who requests. After all, the sirens themselves aren't interested in sex: they're looking for their next meal. They need to appeal to the altruistic as well as the greedy. Therefore, according to Atwood, the siren's song is a cry for help. This will get the sexually inclined on the siren's island because of their hope for a reward, and the more altruistic will go out of their own willingness. Atwood ends her poem with “Alas/it is a boring song/but it works every time.

But does it work every time?

Presumably, Brigid used the same ploy on Floyd Thursby. We don't know much about their relationship other than it revolved around the falcon, mistrust, and ended with Thursby's death. Thursby was a dangerous, violent man, and so are Gutman’s men, but she survives and thrives in their midst. She survives because she doesn't overtly rely on violence, but rather on her allure.

Atwood's interpretation of the siren song contains the lines, “Only you, only you can,/you are unique.” The siren's goal is to lure in someone unsuspecting, to reassure them that they have the means to help her with her situation. Brigid uses the same ploy on Spade, but come the end of the novel, he refers to Thursby as his “predecessor” (224), showing he recognizes Brigid's scheme. Spade knows that, to her, he isn't unique: he's merely a means to an end. Knowing this, Spade never trusts her and never buys her act or her long-winded pleas. He doubts her, grows tired of her, and even searches her room and has his secretary spy on her.

Sam Spade has an interesting reaction to Brigid’s siren song. Knowing what happened to Thursby, and aiming to solve the case without ending up dead, he plays around with Brigid and her song. He doesn’t plug his ears like Odysseus’ men, nor does he listen and leave as Odysseus himself did. Miles Archer, as previously discussed, heard her song (saw the siren) and went after her eagerly. Spade, in his cynicism, doesn’t trust the siren’s song. Instead, he questions it, peels it back, and examines the words, the singer, and their purpose. Perhaps he was able to do this because he was faced by only one siren, and he saw what happened to Miles because he listened to and chased after the siren’s song.

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Works Cited

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

Atwood, Margaret. "Siren Song." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d.. Web. 8 Aug 2016. <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/32778>

We're not sad: The death of Miles Archer

As if the title of this post doesn’t spell it out, Miles Archer, the partner of The Maltese Falcon’s protagonist Sam Spade, dies. It isn’t a heroic or noble death after a novel’s worth of adventures and near misses designed to bring the two into harmony. To borrow a cinematic term, Archer dies off-screen between the first and second chapters.

So, what’s he there for? While there’s an argument to be made about Archer’s death getting the plot going, it would have been easier to just not have Archer at all. Why bother, then? Archer and his death, rather than creating sympathy, remorse, or advancing the plot, are acts of world building: they cue us to the laws and morals we’re dealing with in The Maltese Falcon.

As a person, Miles Archer is a cad. He's flirtatious, “appraising” their client's, Miss Wonderly’s, form, and is quite keen to take her case. After Spade tells him not to “dynamite her too much,” Archer declares, “Maybe you saw her first, Sam, but I spoke first.” Sam is more prudent, but doesn't condemn his partner's actions, remind him about Mrs. Archer (more on that), or point out the client is young enough to be his daughter. These aren’t gentlemen working for the sake of justice or craft, they’re guys.

And then comes Chapter 2, “Death in the Fog”, which opens with a telephone call waking Spade in the night. Only getting what Spade says, we learn someone's dead. The story follows Spade, almost step by step, to the crime scene where we learn Archer is the victim, and through this sequence, Spade shows little emotion, let alone remorse. We get nothing of Spade's thoughts, and he remains stolid and unemotional throughout: he approaches it as if it’s just another murder.

So how was their partnership? What did Spade think about his deceased partner? Two events answer this question. First, Spade instructs his secretary to have the “Spade & Archer” on their door changed to “Samuel Spade”, literally expunging his memory from their offices. Second, when Spade takes the widowed Mrs. Archer into his office, the two kiss like the boat is sinking. Her mourning is rendered superficial and she’s willing to continue her affair with her late husband’s partner, even if he isn’t. Everyone just worries about themselves because they all have something they’re hiding.

The result of all this is, when Miles Archer is dead, no one – not his partner, wife, secretary, or even the reader – is saddened by the tragedy. There's a little anger and frustration, but there's no emphatic eulogizing, remorse or regrets. His brief appearance in Chapter 1 shows an unsavory, albeit not villainous, fellow, so it isn’t much of a loss. We don’t even know how good a detective he was, and Sam and Mrs. Archer benefit from his death. Everyone is too busy looking out for their own safety and keeping track of their lies to care about, let alone mourn, someone’s death.

I find the death of Miles Archer interesting and significant, not just for The Maltese Falcon, but for the genre as a whole: we're given a pair of detectives, little to go off of to understand them, and when there's a death, nothing is done to give us any reason to mourn. I can't even call Archer's murder a symbolic death of the noble private detective, men like Holmes because he's the opposite of that archetype, nor is his death symbolic of the death of these kinds of characters because of Sam's own double dealing with Mrs. Archer and the other characters. Archer's death is an indication of the kind of world we're entering: one where no one is to be trusted, everyone holds something back, no one cares much for each other, and people die; where heroes can be as despicable as the villains and the villains appear as innocent as schoolgirls, blurring the lines between good and bad and pitching the black and white of Holmes' world into a sea of gray.

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Works Cited

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

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. 

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.

Socially Distinct: The Underlying influence of Noblesse Oblige

In my last post, introducing Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett and the evolution of the hard boiled detective, I compared the professions of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dashiell Hammett and how these professions influenced the development of their fictional detectives.

In this post, I want to discuss the cultural climate that surrounded these two writers.

Yeah. Get ready for some serious oversimplification. These are the kinds of things people write books about, and I have 600 words. To help, I’m using a rather simple concept at the center of these distinctions: noblesse oblige.

Noblesse oblige literally means “nobility obliges” and is the concept that the nobility and aristocratic classes have, by virtue of their position and (inherited) wealth, an obligation to help the lower classes. This was generally put into practice by hiring servants and farmers, while the nobility was able to live off of interest, inheritances, and revenue so they could live a life of leisure. The result was a rigid social hierarchy without much social mobility: you died in the station you were born into.

It's kind of like Feudalism with fewer serfs and more servants.

I want to use this concept because it's a principle that gives us a glimpse at broad social and cultural structures. It's an interesting way to look at some of the main differences that crop up in Doyle and Hammett's world building because both lived in societies governed primarily by money: who had, who didn’t, who earned it, who wanted it and what they’d do to get it.

First, Doyle. At the end of the Victorian Era and the beginning of the modern era, when Holmes was gunning the letters VR (Victoria Regina, or Queen Victoria) into the wall of his Baker Street room, there was a rising middle class, but still an aristocratic hierarchy. Doyle, a conservative physician, wasn't interested in strong critiques of this hierarchy: he was interested in maintaining it. In short, noblesse oblige, while not addressed outright in Holmes stories, has left its mark on Doyle and his writing, evidenced in Doyle's tendency to maintain the status quo: people who inherited money and position on top, tradesmen and businessmen in the middle, and unskilled laborers on the bottom, and the less “English” someone was, the lower they sat. As a result, the people Holmes encounters tend to be satisfied with their position and finances. There may be some interest in earning a bit more here and there, but many of the villains Holmes encounters, like Milverton, have or are trying to earn enough money so they could change their social standing. In short, a Holmes villain is usually one who wants more: more money, more prestige, more power.

Then there's Hammett, coming from an American tradition devoid of the noblesse oblige. Hammett’s America was a culture where people earned their money. Industrialists like John D. Rockefeller, William Randolph Hearst, and Andrew Carnegie loomed large, men who came from very little, and became extremely powerful and wealthy. I'm not saying Hammett aspired to their levels of success (Hammett actually quit the Pinkertons because he disagreed with their strikebreaking practices), but he came from a culture where money was earned, not inherited, and where there was not a sense of superiority based on inherited titles and wealth. The result is Hammett and those that would follow him, (Raymond Chandler in particular) would be more critical of social establishments, the wealthy, and inheritances, with greed becoming a more universal vice and more characters who lie, complicating the detective's task.

The result is Hammett gave himself much more leeway, many more shades of gray to explore than Doyle explored. Characters become much more mobile socially, ethically, and even geographically, while station, lineage, and money, either don't mean anything, or do more harm than good. It's harder to pin anything down or identify where it belongs. It's easier to lie and just as easy to doubt. Holmes usually only had to doubt the honesty of the villains. Spade has to doubt everyone's honesty.

In short, Doyle adhered to the concept of noblesse oblige. Noblesse oblige and a rigid social hierarchy kept people in place, and people were satisfied with their social situation because there was little social mobility. Hammett and his hard boiled compatriots dealt with a world without that rigidity, and if honesty and hard work didn't get you a better position, some lies and crime might: people got where they are not through noble virtue and blood, but through questionable and illegal practices.

If you want to see justice meted out and feel like the world is a safe, stable place, read Holmes stories. If you want a world that's more cynical, mistrusting, but arguably more realistic, read a good hard boiled detective novel.

Write what you know: The Physician and the Detective

A common adage among writers is "write what you know"; doing so lends credibility to your work because you're able to write authentically. This is not to say it's impossible for writers to make up stuff or write about professions or lives beyond their own, but a story written by someone who personally knows and understands the subject matter is much more likely to be believed. I write about composition and literature because it's what I study and teach. If I were to try blogging about, say chemistry, I'd need to do loads of research and even then what I'd write would be inferior.

This brings us to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, physician. Doyle had a humble medical practice before becoming an author, with his fiction, Sherlock Holmes in particular, becoming so successful he began writing full time. Extrapolating from his medical training, it's safe to assume Doyle understood the value of symptoms. A doctor's job is to heal the sick, but they first have to identify the condition, with their symptoms: in the same way a physician would look at the type of rash or hear the tenor of a cough, Sherlock Holmes reads people: external signs indicate deeper meaning only to those with the right understanding. In this regard, medical treatment and detective work are both professions that deal with external ailments where the sufferer lacks the skills and knowledge to properly diagnose and treat the symptoms.

This symptomatological approach to detective work is not exclusive to Holmes: the detective's job is, after all, to detect, but where Doyle drew on his medical training to create a detective, Dashiell Hammett drew on his experience as a detective to create a detective. Dashiell Hammett worked for a time as a Pinkerton detective. 

This contrast shows itself in these authors’ approaches to their genres and their characters. Doyle created a romanticized, idealized detective, and not just in literature: within Holmes stories themselves, Holmes is the best of the best, solving cases others are unable to solve, and far more interested in the mystery than any financial gain. Hammett's detectives, Sam Spade, Nick Charles, and the Continental Op, were run of the mill detectives. Sure, they had impressive success rates, but, within the story world, they're just regular, albeit talented, detectives doing a gritty, unpopular, shady job, trying to keep their work private. To ironically quote Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes, “I'm a private detective; the last thing I need is a public image” (Sherlock “A Scandal in Belgravia”, 2012).

This variation in style leads to variations in how the authors morally approach issues. Holmes worked to maintain social normativity: to return everything to a pre-crisis equilibrium. This leads to a morally black and white, romanticized story world: there are bad people doing bad things, so Holmes is brought in not just to rectify the wrongs in the case, but to set right social situations.

The worlds of Hammett's fiction are not that stark, and people are not simply good or bad: some are better than others and some are worse, but there are many more shades of gray, many of them rather dark, particularly on the part of the detectives themselves. Sam Spade is as stoic as he is devious: his motivations aren't clear until they absolutely have to be revealed, so it isn't clear whose benefit he's looking out for: his own, the common good, or the client’s. This ambiguity is only accented by the range of fraudulent, devious characters Spade has to deal with.

In short, the original professions of these authors shows itself in their writing, resulting in very different detectives. The physician, a man whose goal was to heal the sick gave us the nigh unstoppable detective who healed social wounds. The real-life detective, a man whose job was to snoop and sneak, to investigate where he might not be wanted in places others might not want to go, introduced us to a more cynical detective.

And what’s a cynical detective without a cynical world? Dashiell Hammett gave Spade a much more nuanced, but also much bleaker, darker, world to have to deal with than Doyle gave Holmes; story worlds born not only of the detectives’ or authors’ world views, but of the cultural climates both authors inhabited.

More of that in the next post.