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.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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.

A class of their own: Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett, and the the Hard-Boiled Detective

Two years after the last Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place” (1927) was published, an interesting new literary detective appeared: Sam Spade, protagonist of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. While Sherlock Holmes would remain the quintessential fictional detective, the newcomer Sam Spade would represent a paradigm shift in the genre, turning the literary detective from the unique, virtuous consulting Holmes, to the shady private investigator.

Holmes boasted he's the only one of his kind. He is not a police investigator; he’s a consulting detective: a private individual to whom government and police officials go when their own skills are insufficient. Similarly, Holmes possess a certain classlessness: he is socially mobile, working for the wealthy, the noble, and the poor, demonstrating at varying times gentlemanly and bohemian traits: immaculate in attention to his appearance and yet Baker Street is a perpetual mess (from the few indications we receive); he enjoys attending concerts and, when bored, will generously partake of opium or cocaine, habits Watson openly detests. Holmes is therefore both rarefied and reified: unique, beyond the scope of normal people and minds, yet has Watson and other traits to ground him in reality. With no disrespect, Holmes is almost a cartoon character: the stories represent him in a believable way, until we really start thinking about it.

This is not Sam Spade. The only major similarities that emerge between Sam Spade, the man who looks “rather pleasantly like a blond Satan,” and Sherlock Holmes are their shared profession, and even there, it gets fuzzy. There's little resemblance between the two, and the same could be said for the other hard-boiled detectives who follow in Spade's wake: Spade and his hard-boiled fellows form a class of their own.

The hard-boiled literary private investigators are not the generous gentlemen of Holmes and Watson, liminal figures free to move almost with impunity. They belong in their own social sphere: Spade and his business partner, Archer, formed a partnership presumably not to split the rent but because they both share the same profession, and neither can claim to be its sole practitioner. They’re not anomalous like Holmes, existing beyond and between the societal norms: they’re just representatives of a certain class of individuals, a subculture that pokes its way through other subcultures and those who inhabit them.

Spade, Archer, and others of their ilk inhabit a class of snoops and sneaks, working for their clients and not necessarily for the social good. They’re frequently violent men who carry guns not in case they encounter something dangerous (as Holmes infrequently asks Watson to bring his revolver) but because they will encounter something dangerous. They drink and smoke habitually and are near constant loners. They generally live alone and work alone, a pest to the official forces rather than an aid. Social outsiders rather than social maintainers.

It can be said Spade and his literary compatriots take what Holmes represents and turn it down a dark, cynical, violent path. However, this is not simply an inversion of style or character, but is the result of social changes that set apart the rigid but precarious Victorian world with the more cynical and experimental post war era of Modernism. We can then turn to three different contributing factors that created very different worlds for the 1887 A Study in Scarlet and 1929's The Maltese Falcon to appear in.

• First of all, Dashiell Hammett was himself a Pinkerton detective, as opposed to Doyle's professional life as a physician and occasional police consultant.
• Second, Spade and Hammett are Americans, not British, meaning many of the philosophies about social hierarchy and class distinction that undercut much of Doyle's work are absent.
• Third, the The Maltese Falcon was published in 1929 – after the first World War, and after the Stock Market Crash.

All of these factors, which I'll address in more detail in the coming posts, all converge on the creation of a different kind of detective, and while Dashiell Hammett and Sam Spade may never eclipse Doyle and Holmes in popularity, they nevertheless form a progression in the development and solidifying of a significant literary genre.

Detective Fiction and Social Spheres: Sherlock Holmes and “A Jury of Her Peers”

Detective Fiction has an interesting social potential, something I alluded to in the posts about Sherlock Holmes, but is more pertinent with Glaspell's “A Jury of Her Peers.” Detective Fiction gives us a way to look at the different fears, concerns, and anxieties not just in general, but of specific social groups, and even how different social groups are anxious about one another. The juxtaposition of “A Jury of Her Peers” and Sherlock Holmes gives an interesting comparison.

Sherlock Holmes stories typically deal with a range of nationalities, racial issues, gender, and social classes. It has been strongly argued Holmes himself relies on these different social spheres to make his deductions, and it's his dependence on these that lets Irene Adler get away. Sherlock Holmes is almost always working to get people back where they belong, ultimately reinforcing Victorian standards.

“A Jury of Her Peers” works similarly: relying on social norms and expectations to identify where there's deviance, but to a different end than Sherlock Holmes. Rather than reinforce the social norms, “A Jury of Her Peers” works to criticize the social norms in the way it presents gender, marriage, and household dynamics. The gender dynamic is the main one here because gender determines social roles: men are farmers, attorneys, and sheriffs. Women are housewives. Men work outside the home in the serious business world. Women work in the home and kitchen, surrounded by, to use the men's term, “trifles.”

Bad men in Sherlock Holmes stories fail in their prescribed social roles: they are bad husbands, brothers, and lovers, and Holmes comes to remove the bad masculinity and replace it with Victorian normativity. “A Jury of Her Peers” features a bad husband but the other male characters make no suggestion they see him as a bad husband. If anything, they criticize the way Minnie has run her house, where Martha and Mrs. Peters are able to see how Mr. Wright made Minnie’s life miserable by being a bad husband. “A Jury of Her Peers” doesn't say “Here's an example of a man failing at his social role” but rather, “Here's a woman who suffered because she was caught in a bad situation with a bad husband.”

When we read “A Jury of Her Peers” as not about a murder but about the way women are treated and the bad situations women have, we stop looking just at Minnie Foster and look at how the other women in the story are represented. Martha Hale and Mrs. Peters may not suffer to the same extent Minnie Foster did, but they are more victims of social normativity than benefactors: Martha Hale is clearly more mature and rational than her husband, but she does as he says because he's her husband, and Mrs. Peters, “married to the law” is tacit and nervous, overshadowed by her husband. Martha Hale and Mrs. peters situation is most exemplified by the silence: rather than defend Minnie Foster, they hide the incriminating bird. To a modern reader, this can seem odd, but women in 1917 wouldn't have been listened to.

“A Jury of Her Peers” gives us a unique look of a woman's perspective on social situations from a century ago. Fiction’s ability to transport us to different lives is hardly a secret. Detective Fiction, though, does interesting things with this social dynamic. Specifically, by placing the detective in new, often unfamiliar situations. Doing so requires the detective have an outsider's perspective while still having to understand the culture if they're to solve the mystery. In doing so a detective may have to go from social sphere to social sphere getting a better understanding of customs and anxieties as they see how people behave appropriately and inappropriately in these various subcultures to solve the mystery.