The Maltese Falcon Literary Elements

Crime fiction/Detective Novel

1920 San Francisco

The novel is written in the third person objective as seen through the eyes of its protagonist, private detective Sam Spade.

The tone of the book starts out as cynically snarky, but as events drive the only character with anything even remotely close to a moral code of honor into a swirling pool of cess, the mood grows increasingly more cynical and its humorous bite gets ever darker

Protagonist: Sam Spade. Antagonists: The desperate trio of treasure seekers willing to do anything for the bird: Brigid, Cairo and Gutman.

The major conflict is between Sam Spade who comes into possession of the actual physical bird and the trio who have been chasing after it across the globe and are all willing to negotiate a better deal with Spade, shift alliances among themselves and sell everybody out--include Spade.

The climax of the story is the culmination of the long sequence when Spade, Joel Cairo, Gutman, Brigid and Wilmer are waiting for the parcel containing the falcon to arrive. Even though the novel starts out with the mystery of who killed Spade's partner and why, that revelation is secondary as a climax to the revelation that the precious statue they have almost even gotten killed over is an utterly worthless fake made of lead.

One of the first bits of information the novel conveys is a description of Sam Space as "good looking version of Satan." Deceit is often listed as Satan's most powerful weapon against humans. Before the reader knows anything else about Spade, they know he is in some ambiguous way satanic. This is an important foreshadowing of the many deceptions that Spade must enact in order to the truth of a group of people who have perfected the art of underhanded deceit.

"Hello…. Yes, speaking…. Dead?... Yes...fifteen minutes....thanks." Such is the description of how Sam Spade receives and responds to the news that his business partner has been murdered. Understatement in the novel is not about an ironic lowering of expectations, it is the driving emotion mode for expressing its tone and darkening mood.

Gutman's long backstory of the origin of the Maltese Falcon makes repeated allusions to the Knights of Malta and Spain's Emperor Charles V.

The most prevalent imagery in Hammett's spare prose style today sticks out especially because of its political incorrectness. The descriptions of physical appearance and mannerisms of Joel Cairo and Gutman are unmistakably intended to convey coded homosexuality. Likewise, the relationship between Gutman and Wilmer is effective summarized in Spade dismissal of the younger man with the term "gunsel" which does not mean a hood with a gun, but was 1930s slang for a young boy kept by aging homosexual men.

The most fascinating paradox in the novel is Sam Spade as a character and the extent of that paradox almost reaches the breaking point at which he become willing to send Brigid to jail even though he is in love with her for murdering his partner whom he either trusted or liked very much.

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The falcon itself serves as a metonymic metaphor for everything that has been invested in it: legendary origin, untold wealth, a curse upon those hoping to find it and the great mystery of its provenance. As far as anyone in the novel knows, it may literally be only a worthless lead reproduction intended for duping the grandest hopes of true believers.

Brigid is the very personification of a pathological liar. Gutman and Cairo and even Sam Spade are more than willing to use deceit and withhold information if that's what it takes to get what they are after, but at times Brigid almost seems to lie for no other reason than that she can't help herself. Even Gutman fails the test of personifying gluttony, but Brigid is so far gone that it almost seems likely she would not know how to cope with with the rest of the world if forced to tell the truth only as much as the average person.