How The Maltese Falcon inspired film noir

Dashiell Hammett's drama was a ground-breaking work of detective fiction which paved the way for film noir, says Will Hodgkinson

Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon was made into a 1941 film starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor
Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon was made into a 1941 film starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor Credit: Photo: Rex Features

The "hard-boiled" genre of detective fiction - tough realism with a vernacular dialogue; a focus on the less noble side of humanity - was defined for all time when Dashiell Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon, a multi-layered tale of greed and deceit.

It introduced into the novel form the key elements of 20th-century detective fiction: the flawed outsider hero, the dangerous woman, the confusing plot, and lie upon lie peeled away to reveal the truth. Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard and even William Burroughs have all acknowledged the debt they owe to The Maltese Falcon.

The story illustrates the traps of vice that humanity can fall into. A jewel-encrusted statuette of a falcon becomes the object of a hunt in which a bunch of crooks double- and triple-cross one another in their desire to possess the bird.

The world-weary detective Sam Spade gets pulled in after a woman, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, comes to him with a phoney tale of searching for her sister and, when Spade's partner is shot, he takes on a dangerous crusade to find out what his glamorous client really wants.

Hammett was writing from experience. Following a series of dead-end jobs, he worked as a detective in 1920s San Francisco - one of his high-profile cases was the Fatty Arbuckle rape trial. But ill health (Hammett caught tuberculosis while serving in the US army during the First World War) made detective work increasingly hard, so he turned to writing.

The Maltese Falcon was his first big success, resulting in seven printings in the first year and a new circle of literary friends including Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker and the playwright Lillian Hellman, with whom Hammett had a long, torrid affair.

Hammett was as flawed a man as Sam Spade. Gambling, heavy drinking, prostitutes and gifts for lovers ate into the considerable sums he made from his books and film rights.

In 1946 he was jailed for four months for his involvement with a group of communists who jumped bail on a conspiracy trial, and the same year he was hit with a demand by the IRS for a back payment of taxes. Bankrupted, blacklisted and alcoholic, Hammett wrote no more from then until his death in 1961.

Despite his slender output, Hammett had a profound effect not only on crime fiction but also on film and television. John Huston's 1941 film of The Maltese Falcon provided the formula for film noir, with Humphrey Bogart as the ultimate disillusioned detective and Mary Astor as the classic femme fatale.

It's a formula that has cropped up again and again, in The Big Sleep (1946), Chinatown (1974), and Blood Simple (1984).

As for the original Maltese Falcon, it was once though to have been long gone, after Bogart dropped it in the middle of a scene, but this week sold for £2.5m at auction.

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