I have a hard time keeping up with journals and blogs mainly because I can't just write or type something. I have to scrutinize every word and read my entry multiple times before I can submit, and often one post takes me hours to write. Maybe it's a good thing the home office of the company I work for turned me down because they didn't think I would be fast enough to keep up with the pace they needed for communications between the office and the field.
Anyway, I'm here to give a review to The Maltese Falcon. Let me preface this with the story of why I wanted so badly to read this book. Years ago I watched a little famuos movie called The Usual Suspects which has an incredibly well-written twist ending. It's brilliant. Capital 'B' Brilliant. One day I was reading an article about the movie (a review in Rolling Stone or something) and the reviewer compared the movie to the mystery novel The Maltese Falcon, saying the ending of The Usual Suspects was second only to Falcon as the greatest surprise ending in the history of writing. Naturally, I needed to read The Maltese Falcon. I have, for years mind you, avoided even reading synopses of this book for fear of the ending being revealed. This happened to me once when I read the introduction to a book, where the introduction talked about the various ways to interpret the ending. I was not happy.
So I bought the book and began reading. First, it was not well-written, despite the caption on the front cover saying "Dashiell Hammet is a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer." (The Boston Globe.) It's funny, when you notice things you know you do in your own writing and realize how annoying they must be to readers once you see them through the eyes of a reader. Hammet would describe the actions in a scene excrutiatingly thoroughly, like how Sam Spade would pull a cigarette, put it to his lips, take out his matches, take out one match, light it, lift it to the cigarette, etc. Jesus, he lit a cigarette, okay? I mean, that kind of detail is fine the first time but not every freaking time he lights a cigarette or cigar. It also made for some choppy reading.
I recognize the book was most likely ahead of its time, and that it used specifically precise slang for detectives and criminals of the 1920s, but I just found a lot of the dialogue and even narration laughable. I tried, hard, to understand this book probably set the precedent for using correct slang and dialect, but it just made it sound goofy, like a spoof. I guess I like books that don't try so hard and therefore have a universal feel to them. I bet I would have cared about the characters more if I hadn't been trying to decode what certain phrases meant and hadn't been rolling my eyes at what seemed like a giant cliche.
I wonder if I feel the same when someone uses specific Southern slang, or New York street accents. I wonder if those things have withstood the test of time in the real world (most Southerners still have the same phrases and accent as they did 100 years ago and the same goes with at least the New York accent) where as gangsters in no way speak the way they do in this book. Maybe they do speak that way and I would laugh at them if I heard them today, and promptly be shot.
Worst of all, though, was that the mighty ending, fabled to be the most shocking in all of literature, was extremely disappointing. It was actually obvious from the very beginning. I found myself praying it wouldn't turn out that way. Maybe in 1929 no one had ever made a twist like this before (HIGHLY doubtful - no wait, impossible and I know it's not true because I've read stories written before 1929 with similar twists). I wanted the stupid falcon to mean something more than it does. I'm sorry if that ruins a part of the plot for you but that's an ugly truth about this novel - everything in it was disappointing. I don't feel any need to go back through and see if I can find the clues that were so obvious when the ending was revealed but that were cleverly hidden while in the midst of reading. I felt the need for that when I watched The Usual Suspects, and also felt the details throughout were just amazing and so very brilliant in hindsight. There was a point where the main character of Falcon, Sam Spade, was reading the newspaper and he kept dismissing the financial news as unimportant. He does it twice. I thought that would prove highly important to the legendary twist - that he would have seen everything had he not kept skipping that section - but nope. So very disappointing.
I give this novel a low C-, bordering on a D+. I think it might not have faired as badly had I not been anticipating it for so long but that's life, because I had anticipated it and what an anti-climax. I hope my next long-anticipated novel, IQ84 doesn't disappoint.
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