Book Review: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

After reading The Maltese Falcon, all I can say is that Dashiell Hammett would have been a pretty stand-up screenwriter. Strip away the description a bit and pack it into that standard skeletal formatting and you have a nice rough draft of what turned into John Huston's subsequent script by the same name. There's just one thing about screenwriting you have to keep in mind: dialogue is your best friend and you ain't got much else to thread your art on. So I guess you could say he's doing everything right. The only problem is that his 'Falcon' isn't a script at all. It's a novel and the same rules just don't apply.

Example of good dialogue:

"Jesus God! is this the first thing you guys ever stole? You're a fine lot of lollipops! What are you going to do next--get down and pray?"

Geeze Louise, he cracks me up! This is a good show of how kick ass Sam Spade is, as well as a show of how characters are larger than life and chock full of attitude. Perfect exaggerations. I want to be so cool. Verdict: Dialogue, awesome; Characters: the coolest.

Example of bad writing:

"Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases about a hooked nose, and his pale crown hair grew down--from high flat temples--into a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan."

Oy vay, where to start? I now ardently hate the letter v, how do you look pleasantly like a blond satan, and did he really just write "the v motif picked up again??" See, if this was done in scene description he could have gotten away with it. Mere design notes. But in literature?? Tsk tsk, sir. You should know better than to let your audience know that you're weaving in a motif. That's like a magician explaining his tricks!

Anyways... the point is that Hammett's work would work if he'd take his own thumb off the page and let me get to reading. Too often it reads slower than it ought to because he's telling you how to see it instead of just showing you. Still, you gotta admit he sees it straight. The book may not function perfectly on paper, but it exudes so much style I have to go buy a hanky now so I can delicately mop it off my stricken brow. That and I could toss Brigid O'Shaugnessy just to get one more scene with Spade in the same room with Effie Perine. Shoot, every time they pair up you'll start to wonder if your local private eye is looking for a new secretary because, well, that's just damn sexy.