A great private-eye story, the book as good or better than the film. ( )

Great, classic mystery book ( )

anticlimactic. ( )

"The Maltese Falcon" has long been a favorite movie. I was surprised and pleased to discover that most of the movie's dialogue is lifted straight from the book. As to whether the screenwriter and director, John Huston, or novelist Dashiell Hammett made the better choices is debatable. Each, after all, wrote for a different medium. A comparison is illuminative of the virtues of the novel, however. (There are sexual scenes in the book that, of course, are not in the movie; the hints of homosexuality are more explicit in the book, too.)

Below I do give spoilers in the last two paragraphs, although these are not fully revealing of the plot, which has as many delightful twists and turns as the movie does. (The movie, again, lifts them from the book.)

There is more dialogue in the novel. Huston edited it down. Some scenes were unnecessary to the film and would have bogged it down. Perhaps they bog down the novel, too. Let's see if they do. In the novel, Private eye Sam Spade goes to visit his lawyer. In the movie, Spade conducts the gist of the same conversation over the telephone from his own office. While economical from the movie-goer's perspective, this seems to be a wash. It is well and good - but not vital - to see how Spade interacts with other people including his attorney's secretary. (Always condescending in his patriarchal friendliness - or over-familiarity.) Another move for economy's sake is the elimination from the movie of the character Rhea Gutman, Casper Gutman's daughter. She only has one scene in the book, and the plot does not suffer at all from her elimination from the story. Still, again, it is interesting to see how Spade regards women, both cloyingly patronizing (or "patroning" in AOC-speak) and gallantly (over-)protective.

Most interesting in this regard is the story Spade tells Brigid O'Shaughnessy about a previous case involving a man named Flitcraft who walked away from one middle-class family and, after living a breezy lifestyle for a while, settled into yet another middle-class family life complete with a new wife - without benefit of having divorced his first one. The point of the story seems to be to convey that people do not change their stripes even when they start out to do so. Or, perhaps, Spade is telling the tale about a male shapeshifter who could not hide who he really was. This might be relevant because his audience for this tale, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, is herself a shapeshifter extraordinaire. She has gone by at least three names and told Spade at least four different stories about her past and her current aims. Maybe Spade sees through her lies because - like the man in Spade's story - she cannot hide who she really is - a femme fatale, a borderline personality who uses people and throws them away. Is this the reason for Spade telling this story? Is he conscious of this reason for telling it? IDK.

The novel's dialogue is so close to that of the movie that it spawned (There are actually two previous movie versions, neither as good as Huston's attempt) that it seems uncanny as well as pleasurable to the fan of the 1940 film. (The novel was published a decade earlier.) However, Huston's script deviates from the novel at the end. Gutman's death is not reported at the end of the movie as it is in the novel. More significantly, the movie ends with the police detective asking what the Maltese falcon is, and Spade replying, "The stuff that dreams are made of," which is not a line from the book but one borrowed from Shakespeare's "The Tempest" (Act IV). With this final line, Huston focuses our attention on the macguffin - the black bird of the title - and suggests that the greedy quest for the bird has perhaps been based on a foolish illusion, hardly worth the lives it has cost.

The novel ends with a subsequent scene: Spade is back in his office. So is his secretary, Effie Perine, who, as in the movie, is "strong for" O'Shaughnessy, fully taken in by the latter's claim that she is a damsel in distress. Effie is horrified that Spade turned O'Shaunessy over to the police. She does not appreciate Spade's calculus that led him to turn her in - a combination of moral considerations with a large dollop of self-interest. Effie sees Sam as unforgivably treacherous and can't stand to be touched by Sam, or perhaps even to be in the same room with him. Then Effie tells Sam that his late partner's widow, Iva, has arrived. Sam sighs before having Iva let into his private office. He does not want her, but he feels he needs to manage her clingy delusions about her relationship with him. Sam Spade solved the case and lived to tell of it, but some problems connected to the case - really, unleashed by it - are only beginning. ( )

I don't usually like mysteries but this one was pretty good. ( )