Backlisted - The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammet

Episode Date: June 19, 2023

We are joined by the crime novelist Mark Billingham to discuss his favourite book, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. First serialised in Black Mask magazine in 1929 and published the following year in book form by Alfred A. Knopf, it is widely considered to have inaugurated the hard-boiled genre of detective fiction. It introduces the tough, abrasive and morally ambiguous private detective, Sam Spade, who sent Dorothy Parker ‘mooning about in a daze of love such as I had not known for any character in literature since I encountered Sir Lancelot.’ The labyrinthine plot turns around the eponymous falcon of the title – a statuette so valuable that three people are killed in the search to retrieve it. But, as the discussion reveals, it is not the plot that has made the book a classic. Hammett’s San Francisco, filled with sharp-tongued dames, wise-cracking gumshoes, cops on the take and thugs on the lam, spawned a whole genre of noir novels and movies – including John Huston’s classic adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor in 1941. In 1995, the Mystery Writers of America voted The Maltese Falcon the third greatest crime novel of all time. In this episode, illuminated by Mark’s own long experience of writing in the genre, we try to find out why. Timings (after any advert's): 08:43 - The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammet * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit backlisted.fm Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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No such thing as informal chat on this podcast now. It's all formal chat. Right. Are we... It's all discourse. Begin the discourse. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. Today, you find us in downtown San Francisco on a foggy evening in 1929. In an alley off Bush Street, a single shot rings out. There's a crash as something or someone smashes through the fence that runs alongside the alley and tumbles to the bottom of the slope. A car

pulls away, its headlights angling across the street. Then silence returns. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the publisher of Unbound, where people crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today on Backlisted, we are joined by a new guest, Mark Billingham, making his Backlisted debut. Welcome, Mark.

Hi, Mark. Hello, thank you for having me. Mark Billingham is one of the UK's most acclaimed and popular crime writers. His series of novels featuring D.I. Tom Thorne has twice won him the Crime Novel of the Year award. Every single one of his 23 novels has been a Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller, and his debut novel, Sleepyhead, was chosen by the Sunday Times as one of the 100 books that had shaped the decade. In 2021, he received the award for Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival.

And his latest novel is The Last Dance, the first in a new series featuring Detective Sergeant Declan Miller, published by Sphere. A Sky television series based on the Thorne novels starred David Morrissey as Tom Thorne, and a series based on In the Dark and Time of Death was broadcast on the BBC in 2017. Mark lives in London with his wife and two children. When he's not living out rock star fantasies

as a member of the fun-loving crime writers, about whom we shall talk in a moment, he is hard at work writing his next novel. Mark, I saw you and your fellow fun-loving crime writers uh back in january giving an unplugged performance and chatting in an informal setting yes is it quite difficult to make your diaries fit with one another if you need to get because you were pretty good and you know you were saying on stage well we don't get together to rehearse very often. Getting together is hard because not only have we all got, you know,

busy diaries, but we all live in different cities. You know, we've got people coming from Scotland and Northern Ireland and the south of England and the north of England. And so trying to get us in the same place, you know, at the same time is tricky. And sometimes we'll rehearse at sound checks you know yeah yeah we have to do that yeah so i think when val mcdermott was with us she she was saying that she really enjoys it because it seems like a it's like a bonus it's not it's not what she got into crime

writing for and yeah and yeah here it is oh it's exactly what I got into crime writing for. I knew this day would come. No, no, I feel exactly the same as Val. I mean, as the two oldest members of the band, the pair of us both look at each other sometimes and go, how did this happen? You know, what started out as just a bit of fun that we could do late night at some festivals has become a bit full on in a good way.

It is a fixed lineup, or is it like a Style Council style arrangement with you and Val? No, no, no, no. It is a fixed lineup now. No, it is definitely now. Because of the difficulty of getting us all together, early on we did the odd gig where one of us wasn't there.

Notably when we were playing in uh in iceland and val called us when we were at the airport to say i'm not going to make it i'm feeling terrible so we went and we played this show in iceland we figured out you know we reaching a set no show mcdermott no show mcdermott and and to be honest we just decided we'd never do it again. We'd never do that again. And so we've always had that thing of it's all six of us or it's none of us. And how, Mark, how do you fit your writing commitments in around your touring schedule? You write prolifically, right? And it seems to me, judging from what you were saying and your fellow panellists were saying,

that it's important readers want a series they often want a series so when you commit to a new book you're probably committing to three or four new books if you get it away and it's working yeah do you how do you balance out this whole thing of promoting the work with creating the work? Well, I suppose I just have a fairly good inbuilt sense of a calendar in that I know that that is writing time and that is showing off time. Because I can't mix the two things. I absolutely can't mix the two things. I cannot write in a hotel or on a train.

But that said, and I'm sure other writers have said this to you, you're writing the book in your head all the time. It never goes goes anywhere so that thing is in your head pretty much for the whole year you're writing the book and you're working stuff out and trying to solve problems but i can put that to the back of my head and go this is time to get up on stage and gob off about the previous book or play with the band or whatever it might be and if i'm honest that's the bit i enjoy the most you know i mean i know that a lot of right yeah god i mean i know i'm being off i love it or whatever it might be. And if I'm honest, that's the bit I enjoy the most. You know, I mean, I know that a lot of writers... Yeah, God.

I mean, I know... Gobbing off. I love it. The gobbing off. I know a lot of writers would rather stick needles in their eyes, you know, than stand up on stage

and talk about stuff. And that's the way it used to be. But over the past 20, 25 years, I suppose, increasingly, writers have been under pressure to get out there and sell themselves

as much as they you know the publishers are trying to sell their books and that's the bit i love you know i'm just a big show-off and i come from a sort of performance background so that's the bit i'm like that's the perk the job is sitting in this chair and writing the book and the perk is somebody saying do you want to come and come to this festival and talk about it. When was your first novel published? 2001. Okay, so you've been doing this for over 20 years. Yeah. Crime seems to me to be one of the success stories of the last 20 years.

I mean, we were talking earlier that 1990, when I was at Waterstones, we ran a British crime festival. And I remember the novelty of the party, these crime writers all getting together saying, this is great. It didn't happen as much then. And now it feels to me like it's, you know, publishers know what they're doing with crime

lists. There's obviously, as you say, there's the structure of festivals, there's Harrogate, there's the daggers, which always were a slightly strange, you know, they weren't kind of center stage literary awards, the Crime Writer Association daggers. And now they're kind of big. It's a really big, glitzy occasion. I was there last year. It was fantastic.

And I guess also, you know, you look at television, maybe television has always been full of crime and procedurals, but there seems to be a lot more of it now than there's ever been. And I think you are more likely these days to get an invitation to Hay or Cheltenham or Oxford or one of the more prestigious literary festivals than you would have been 25 years ago yeah it's not there's not that divide there's you know literary generic not so much I mean you still come across it some you still come across it at some places where you you know you walk into the

mind you you know there was a time when if you walked into the green room at Hay and you were a writer, you were in the minority because the place was full of politicians and TV chefs. You'd be looking around going, isn't this a book festival? But no, I mean, obviously crime has just grown enormously in the 20-odd years I've been doing it. But also, of course, we've had just the growth of social media, which means when you've got an event, it's very easy to say, I'm here tomorrow. I'm going to be there next week. Come out and see me at this event or whatever, all that stuff. But it's still hit and miss. It's

still very hit and miss. But a strange thing I've noticed, if you turn up and there's an audience of 200 people and you have a storming event, you'll probably sell less books than you would if you turned up to 40 people. Because the queue's commensurately longer. People have got places to go. It's one of the things that the Hay Festival is very good at. They have that very good bookshop and people seem to be prepared to queue for hours. It's bizarre.

But hey, I mean, bizarre but good. Yes. You do such wild and unpredictable things. Don't be silly. You're taking the fall. You've been playing with me. Just pretending you cared to tap me like this.

You didn't care at all. You don't love me. I won't play the sap for you. You know it's not like that. You don't love me. I won't play the sap for you. Oh, you know it's not like that. You can't say that. You never played square with me for half an hour to stretch since I've known you. You know down deep in your heart that in spite of anything I've done, I love you.

I don't care who loves who. I won't play the sap for you. I won't walk in Thursdays and I don't know how many other footsteps. You killed Miles and you're going over for it. Guess what we're going to talk about? The book we're here to discuss today is in fact a crime novel, The Maltese Falcon by, and listen closely, Dashiell Hammett. First serialized in Black Mask magazine in 1929, and then in book form by Alfred A. Knopf the following year. It's widely considered to be the novel that inaugurated the hard-boiled genre of detective

fiction. It introduces the tough, abrasive, but relentlessly just private detective Sam Spade, who sent Dorothy Parker mooning about in a daze of love such as I had not known for any character in literature since I encountered Sir Lancelot. The labyrinthine plot turns around the eponymous Vulcan of the title, a statuette so valuable that three people are killed in the search to retrieve it. But the plot,

tight as a tripwire though it may be, is not what has made this book a classic. It's the snap of Hammett's dialogue, the dread-laden atmosphere in which all the characters plot and double-cross each other at will,

and the haze of cigarette smoke and hard liquor that surround them that lingers in the memory. Hammett's San Francisco, filled with sharp-tongued dames, wisecracking gumshoes, cops on the take and thugs on the lam, spawned a whole genre of noir novels and movies, including John Huston's classic adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor in 1941. In 1995, the Mystery Writers of America voted The Maltese Falcon the third greatest crime novel of all time. In the next hour, we'll attempt to establish why. To keep you listening, the exciting promise of a quiz later on,

which will establish the surprising links between Dashiell Hammett and Elvis Costello. So we will come on to that before we finish. But first, we'll start where we always start on Backlisted. Mark, where or when or why did you first encounter the Maltese Falcon or the work of Dashiell Hammett? Well, I'd seen the movie, the Bogart movie, and I started going out and buying hardball crime fiction there. Picador did a great,

they did three volumes of Chandler, and they did what they called the four great novels of Dashiell Hammett, in addition, which I still have.

Well, I read all of them, and they're all terrific. And I went out and then got his Continental Ops stories. But The Maltese Falcon is the book I've just been, you know, passionate about ever since.

I've read it, I've probably read it a dozen times. If I'm ever asked to pick a book for any occasion, it will be The Maltese Falcon. Because as John was hinting at there at the beginning, everybody accepts that it's an important novel in terms of its place in the genre and the fact that it kick-started the hardball movement. But my argument, you know, the hill I will die on, is that it's also a great novel, not just an important one. I have to say that I had never read The Maltese Falcon, though, like you were saying, I'd seen the Houston film.

I'd never read the novel before we were preparing this episode. Mitch, you had read it before? I certainly had. You'd read it before? Okay. Well, the first thing to say is I could not believe this novel is nearly 100 years old. Right. Amazing, isn't it? As simple and straightforward as that.

So culturally omnipotent is the voice minted by Hammett in that one novel nearly 100 years ago. It seems impossible that you're reading something that hadn't been written before, and yet you're constantly being reminded that before this guy, no one wrote like that.

Yeah. Extraordinary. Yeah, it is extraordinary and it was didn't charles say something because it was so influential anybody who answers yeah in a book was instantly accused of ripping off i mean we'll come on to the we'll come on to the dialogue later i read it andy when i came down from university i'd'd had enough of very large novels written by people in, you know, periwigs. And I just started to read those Picador collections. And I worked my way through the Hammett collection, the Chandler collection, the James M. Cain collection, went on to Jim Thompson and a lot more in that sort of black mask kind of…

Ross McDonald. Ross McDonald. Some brilliant writers. And for listeners, listeners won't appreciate this, but here is that very volume. Still has my name in the front, as I used to do back in those days. As you said, Mark, the four great novels, but not whichever one they left out.

Well, the one they left out, of course, is the one he's in many ways best known for, which is The Thin Man. Thin Man, okay. Which was made into loads of movies and stuff. Which made him a lot of money, which we'll talk about what he did with that money. But the key, I think, for me, rereading it,

is I have to say, I remember enjoying it hugely at the time. I think maybe when you're younger, you're a bit more impressed by Chandler because you think Chandler's got the flouncey, you know, she was as cute as lace pants, you know, a black hole open at my feet and I fell in. But this is a really great novel. I was blown away by rereading it.

And it's put me in a great mood all week. It's right up there, I would say, I think with Gatsby, with Etranger, by Camus. I think it's a great modern existential classic. Yeah, I mean, I know that, you know, obviously there are always comparisons made with Chandler. And Chandler is often thought of as being actually the better prose stylist.

I would argue with that. And I'm sure we'll come on to talking about the prose. But I think in many ways, actually, Hammett has worn better. And certainly in the case of this novel, I think one of the reasons that Hammett has worn better is that it's the only novel to feature Sam Spade. And I think, you know, again,

whether that's an argument that people can have without ever knowing the answer to it, because maybe he would have written more about Spade if he hadn't been so troubled with ill health and stuff. Can I just dig into that a bit? Is that because you think if he had written Sam Spade repeatedly, perhaps like Marlowe and Chandler, a kind of self-conscious, by rote element might have come in?

I 100% agree. I mean, it's very tempting to believe that Hammett already understood the sort of law of diminishing returns that a series you know. He'd written 37 continental op stories, a couple of novels. He'd cut his teeth writing for

pound a word detective stories, Black Mask. I mean, it was, he kind of learned his craft not, you know, sitting kind of thinking of great thoughts in his bedroom although he had all those great thoughts i think he did he was quite an ambitious he wanted to there's a great story someone says his he was the brightest of his siblings um troubled family who's reading cant emmanuel cant at the age of 13 so he kind of had a kind of...

Maybe come on to this. I know we've got stories about Gertrude Stein and things later, but he learned his craft writing popular stories for the popular detective magazines of the day. Mark, let's say Hammett did not intend to found a genre. We'll come on to maybe why not. But what are the hallmarks of the hard-boiled genre? What should, what are we looking for when we read a hard-boiled crime novel? Well, in terms of prose, you're looking for what I call muscular prose. You're looking

for sort of clipped, short, snappy, hard-boiled sentences. There are the tropes, there's the femme fatale, there's the hard-boiled gumshoe, there's the kind of characters John's already described, you know, the villains on the run, the gangsters, the whatever. And I'm not saying he was the first person ever to write about characters like that. I don't know. I don't know much about what became before Hammett.

What he never did, quite crucially, was take us inside Sam Spade's head, and that's one of the things that makes this novel so unique, I think. When The Maltese Falcon was published and was a surprising success, I think including Hammett, everyone was surprised at its commercial success. He was compared stylistically to Hemingway quite a lot.

And that similar very sparse prose, one of the things that it's perceived that both Hemingway and Hammett were responding to was a kind of post-First World War nobility of conflict language which had led indirectly to the death of so many millions of people, that it was basically the curlicues of style were, were perceived after the first world war as bullshit. And what you needed to do, get down to the heart of the matter,

glory, courage, honor, Hemingway. Yeah. Hammett and Hemingway are much closer in spirit or were perceived as much closer in the spirit in spirit at the time than they would be now but in fact they're both coming from that kind of there's that quote isn't there that um hammett was the better writer because whereas Hemingway's tough language hid weakness.

Softness. Hammett's, yeah, softness. Hammett's language hid toughness. Toughness, yeah. Well, the other name I'm going to throw into the mix here in terms of possible influences, and it's just one I'd love to think was possible, is Noel Coward. Because although what was happening in-

Very hilly San Francisco. Well, what was happening in literary terms on this side of the Atlantic, you know, when the Maltese Falcon was published, of course, was, you know, the early flowerings of what became known as Golden Age fiction here. You know, the classic Between the Wars, Agatha Christie, Marjorie Allingham, blah, blah, blah. But what was happening on the stage, the same year Maltese Falcon came out, was the first production of Private Lives. And it's so tempting to think that, I'm not saying Hammett popped over here and went to see it,

but maybe he'd read Coward because there is something in those exchanges, those sort of tennis match exchanges between Spade and Casper Gutman, that really, you know, they are that kind of fat-free, fizzing kind of crackling dialogue that you associate with somebody like Noel Coward. You know, albeit a very different subject. That's brilliant. Who knows?

Mark, do you want to read us a bit? Yeah. I wonder whether you could set the scene. Well, it's a very easy scene to set because it's the opening of the book. And I deliberately didn't want to read us a bit? Yeah. I wonder whether you could set the scene. Well, it's a very easy scene to set because it's the opening of the book. And I deliberately didn't want to choose anything that has dialogue in because then you become very self-conscious

about the voice you're using and you end up doing a terrible impression of Humphrey Bogart. So this is just the opening of the first chapter, which is called Spade and Archer. 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-gray eyes were horizontal. The V motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising

outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down from high flat temples in a point on his forehead he looked rather pleasantly like a blonde satan he said to effie perrine yes sweetheart long satan and then what happens is what i love is it's the first it's the first time a beautiful, mysterious woman comes in with a roll of cash and has got a mystery that she needs solving. And that is the trope. That's the trope of whole-world detective fiction, right? I remember reading it thinking, oh my God,

he did this before anybody else. This before this. And you think of all the countless books that have started with that. And there's a great, I mean, one of the many, I think, brilliant things in the book are the different ways he relates to the women in the book with his assistant, Effie, which is, it kind of bookends the whole book.

He has a very physical relationship with her that probably wouldn't be allowed today in strict HR terms. Yeah, Effie, I think, is the only, and this is one of the things I love about the book, Effie is probably the only decent person in the entire book. Yes, okay.

And that's for a very good reason. That's for a little trick that Hammett plays in that the first time we meet the femme fatale who starts off being Miss Wonderly and eventually becomes Bridget Spade asks Effie what she thinks of her and Effie says I'm with her and that's the dummy that the reader buys because that's you think well if Effie thinks she's great then we'll go with that but yeah okay one of the things I love about the book because there's so much these days

you see it in television, you see it in books all the time where publishers say who are we rooting for? Who's the relatable character? None of them, they're all horrible including Spade probably which is the mystery of the novel Well I was going to ask you, is Spade

Is he a good guy? That for me is what makes this the archetypal mystery novel because crime fiction in America is called mystery fiction. And most of the time, that's a terrible description because most of the time, the books that are called mystery novels are not mysteries at all. Not really. You know, if the only thing that's going on is who your killer is,

the whodunit, then it's probably a terrible book. But this is genuinely a mystery novel. And the mystery at the heart of it, it's nothing to do with the bloody falcon. You know, the falcon is the biggest MacGuffin in the history. Exactly. The biggest MacGuffin ever. It's the MacGuffin of MacGuffins. Right.

Absolutely. I suppose the mystery at the heart of it is, what is Spade's game? And the reader is encouraged, and this is where the book is very different to the film. The reader is encouraged, actually, to where the book is very different to the film. The reader is encouraged actually to think that Spade is morally corrupt, completely morally corrupt. I mean, he finds out his partner's been shot. The first thing he does is light a fag.

The second thing he does is wipe his partner's name off the door. Oh, and by the way, he's sleeping with his partner's wife. So you kind of think- Treats her really badly. Treats her really badly. He's a fairly terrible person but so is he doing it as he later claims simply because his partner's been killed and he's a man supposed to do something about that if the falcon had turned out to be something other than it does

turn out to be you know would he have waltzed off with it you you never really get to find out and that's what i love about it i suppose also what would be lost to some extent to a reader to us as readers nearly a century later because precisely because of the innovations made by hammett is that idea of the anti-hero is sort of minted here isn't it i mean you would have it would have been the thing you're talking about, would have been much more shocking to a contemporary reader that their supposed hero is at best amoral and possibly immoral, or at least he's immoral to a reader in the late 1920s or early 1930s. I think you're absolutely right, Andy. I think it was kind of revolutionary. And even 10 years later, more than 10 years later, when John Houston is making the film, he can't do that.

You know, you have to be rooting for Humphrey Bogart right from the word go, even though Humphrey Bogart is nowhere near the Sam Spade of the books. One of the things I've always loved is the fact that when Houston made the film, Houston didn't want Bogart. Houston wanted George Raft. And George Raft, of course, who had played lots of killers and extremely amoral characters. He's much closer to the spade in the books than Bogart.

The blonde Satan. I mean, it's there, right? It's a kind of Nietzschean kind of quality. Now, we like to, on this podcast, we like to appraise the blurbs that publishers apply to the books we're talking about. And I've got a treat for you here. I'm going to read you two parts of the jacket flap from the original first

edition of the Maltese Falcon. Go for it. And you tell me guys, whether you think this is doing a good selling job. Mark, do you write your own blurbs or do people write them for you or do you collaborate or? I collaborate.

I mean, it's always struck me as very strange that a writer would want to spend a year writing a book and then not have some say about what it says on the back of it. You'd be surprised, Mark. I know, but,

but, or even what the picture on the front of it is. Yes. No, I absolutely do collaborate. My editor will do a first draft of a blurb and then we'll bat it backwards and forth. Yeah.

Okay. Well, I, I'm going to, I'm going to put my reputation on the line and say I don't think Dashiell Hammett had anything to do with this. But anyway, well, let's see, shall we? I know who his editor was.

Who's his editor? His editor was Blanche Knopf. So Alfred's wife. I reckon Blanche may have been involved here. Let's see what we think. A knockabout romantic comedy that the whole family will enjoy. The man who understands women. Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. Sam Spade is a knockout detective, and yet,

personally, he cares not a hoot for the law. So little, so that constantly he is just on the verge of being pulled by the Frisco cops. When Spade goes out after anything, neither lead slugs, women, nor the old Nick himself can stop him from landing it. Here he sets himself to outwit three contending factions who all want the same thing which he also wants. And it is only natural, therefore, that many murders strew his winding wake, that several persons suddenly fall doped, and a great liner burns mysteriously to the water's edge.

That's terrible, isn't it? It's really terrible, isn't it? Wow. Now, normally when we do this feature, Mark, we end up saying, oh, that was surprisingly good. Yeah. Not in that case. Do you want a bit more? Yeah, go on.

I can't imagine where it's going to go. We turn our attention now to the back flap. They've done the hard sell on that flap, right? Here's the back flap. Dashiell Hammett. Dashiell Hammett writes a superior mystery novel because for many years, he was a Pinkerton detective. Yeah, he was. He is probably the only quote unquote bull who has ever turned his experience into the writing of crime stories.

To Hammett, plot is not the main thing in the story. It is the behaviour of the detective attacking a problem which intrigues him. The op, as Hammett sees him, is quote, a little man going forward day after day through mud and blood and death and deceit as callous and brutal and cynical

as is necessary, towards a dim goal, with nothing to push or pull him towards it, except that he's been hired to reach it. Okay. You see, she hands it over to DeShiel, if indeed it was Blanche Knopf, but everything feels okay, doesn't it?

That's a bit better, yeah. I mean, his experience, the Pinkerton detective thing is really interesting because, I mean, it's an amazing casterton detective thing is really interesting because, I mean, it's an amazing cast of characters that we haven't really mentioned yet, but the cast of characters, supporting characters, is just peerless.

We should do that. It's peerless. And they were all based on characters he'd come across as a detective. So Bridget O'Shaughnessy was a former client. Wilmer, the midget, was a gunman in the book who was based on a villain called the midget bandit, who he dealt with. Joel Cairo was a forger. And the interesting one, Caspar Gutmann,

there are two theories about this, the fat man. One, that he was a German agent that Hammett had come across. The other one, that he was based on Fatty Arbuckle, because Hammett worked on the Fatty Arbuckle rape case, the on the Fatty Arbuckle rape case, the very famous Fatty Arbuckle rape case. Amazing. So some people think he's supposed to be Fatty Arbuckle or based on Fatty Arbuckle. I just want to, as a prompt,

the people who haven't read the book but have seen the film, which might be quite a few people, Sam Spade played by Humphrey Bogart, as discussed, and Bridget O'Shaughnessy played by Mary Astor. But Joel Cairo is unforgettably played by Peter Lorre. Casper Gutman is unforgettably played by Sidney Greenstreet. And Wilma Cook by Elisha Cook Jr. I mean, it's a pretty brilliant...

That's amazing. An amazing cast. Isn't it? Yeah. One of the great film noirs, obviously. Do you know what John Huston's cameo is in his own film? I do not. No.

He plays the sea captain who staggers over the threshold and dies. Captain Jacoby. Captain Jacoby. Brilliant. Which is the only, bear in mind, you know, it's the only death that's actually on the page, as it were. It's the only death we witness. Yes, that's true.

That's right. Of three. Nicky, could we hear a little clip from the Maltese Vulcan by John Houston, please? Mr. Spade, I have a terrible, terrible confession to make. That story I told you yesterday was just a story. Oh, that. Well, we didn't exactly believe your story, Miss. What is your name?

Wanderley or LeBlanc? It's really O'Shaughnessy. Bridget O'Shaughnessy. We didn't exactly believe your story, Miss O'Shaughnessy. We believed your $200. You mean that... I mean you paid us more than if you'd been telling us the truth, and enough more to make it all right.

Tell me, Mr. Spade. Am I to blame for last night? No, you warned us that Thursby was dangerous. Of course, you lied to us about your sister and all that, but that didn't count. We didn't believe you. No, I wouldn't say that you were at fault. Thank you.

George was so alive yesterday. So solid and hearty. Stop it. You know what he was doing? Those are the chances we take. Was he married? Yeah, with 10,000 insurance, no children, and a wife that didn't like him.

It's quite clear from that clip that he didn't give a hoot. The guy who doesn't give a hoot. Seems like that might be an appropriate moment for us to break in the chat just for a message from our sponsors. The film is different, right, Mark? But it doesn't do any damage to the book, does it? No, no, I don't think it does. I mean, especially with that cast that we've already mentioned.

I mean, with the possible exception of Bogart, actually, it's perfectly cast. Do you think, though? Do you think, though? Seriously, though? You think Bogart is not warming it up a bit for the screen? He is, and some of the decisions were Houston's in that. And it's been filmed, certainly, on more than one. There were two films before Houston's film.

But all the film adaptations did the same thing, which the book doesn't. They all chose to show the moment when Spade realises, and obviously we're going to be, this is massive spoiler alert here, when Spade realises who killed his partner, let's say, which is never shown in the book. Again, that is a moment that is left to the reader to try and figure out.

And Bogart, the problem, I suppose, is that Bogart also played Marlowe. That's sort of one of the issues. He's known to play the two iconic, you know, noir, hard-boiled detectives. And there's not a lot to to play the two iconic, you know, noir, hard-boiled detectives. And there's not a lot to choose between the two in their film incarnations. You know, they're kind of interchangeable. No, I'm not saying that film did anything to spoil the book, really.

But the book is a much different experience. If all you know is the film, when you read the book, you'll be quite surprised, I think. Okay, so I want to ask you both then the the the book's justified reputation as the birthplace of the hard-boiled crime fiction has that imprisoned the maltese falcon critically in a way that we you you know, when I was talking about the comparison with Hemingway, which people were very happy to make at the time, they would not make now because of the divide between genre and quote unquote literature. Do you think the Maltese falcon has been slightly imprisoned by genre so that people can't see its literary attributes?

To a degree, that's certainly true. As I said way back at the beginning, I've always tried to maintain it's a great novel and not just an important one. But I think what you're saying is true of almost any beautifully written genre novel. If you started talking to people about serial killer thrillers, let's say, you'd have to make an extremely good argument for the fact that Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris or Red Dragon by Thomas Harris is a wonderful, wonderful novel,

you know, that then spawned a whole host of inferior imitators. There's no question about that. But he's still a great piece of literature. And I will, you know, fight anybody who says any different. And the same is certainly true of, I mean, writers of a certain age, I mean, and it's happened to Chandler. Chandler has certainly been, you know, Chandler is now certainly seen as being in the literary firmament in the same way that Patricia Highsmith is, and probably James M. Cain or Cornel Woolrich or some of those people who were writing. But it's almost like you've got to be dead nearly a hundred years before a genre writer can get the props they deserve from the literary community.

John, do you think there's something, my pet theory on this is that the very thing that Hammett withholds, psychological insight, is the bedrock of so much 20th century literary writing okay so so it's so it's a mission seems like not a deliberate choice but a failure in some ways if read in a particular way though though it seemed to me reading it afresh that wasn't the case at all so uh well i've got two things to say about. One is going back to the list of the greatest crime novels of all time, or the greatest list that the mystery writers of America in 1995 put together. Really interesting.

Their first was Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle, the complete Sherlock Holmes. Second was Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination. And then third was the Maltese Falcon. So they're already quite literary things to have at the top of the list, I think you could argue that Holmes is, but Poe is definitely seen to be a kind of a literary writer. And I think you're right, Andy, that Maltese Falcon happens at a really interesting juncture, I think, in what's going on in 20th century literature.

The French don't have such a problem with this. They don't have a problem with seeing great art as genre. But he writes, Hammett writes to his editor, Blanche Knopf, and says, I want to write a stream of consciousness novel. He was a huge admirer of Gertrude Stein and apparently also Henry James. And then suddenly got a contract to do some stuff for Hollywood, to do some writing for Hollywood. So he says, I've had a bit of a change in plan with my stream of consciousness novel.

He said, I want it to be, I'm only going to write in objective and filmable form. So it was what the critic I was reading said, it's perhaps that The Maltese Falcon is the first book that was ever conceived as a film before it was written, that he already had this idea that it was about scenes and exteriors. I think you're right to say that the lack of psychology in it has maybe sometimes made it more difficult. You've got to also see that it's surrounded by a lot of stuff that isn't anywhere near as good as the Maltese Falcon.

But I would say, I mean, I genuinely think that it does bear comparison as a work of 20th century American art. One of the things that doesn't happen in the book, in the film, is when Spade goes back to the office at the end, he's quite depressed to realise that in the end he's trapped. You know, Mary Astor, Bridget O'Shaughnessy may be going to jail, but he's trapped in his life as a detective. And I think some knowledge of what happens next in Hammett's life

only makes you see what an extraordinary one-off achievement the Maltese Falcon is. Well, Bridget O'Shaughnessy, of course, won't just be going to jail. She'll be going to her death. Yes. And Spade has sent her to her death. You know, she pleads. She begs and pleads for him to let her go.

And then he reels off a list of seven. He reels off a list of seven reasons in this big, long speech why he can't possibly do that and sends her off, almost certainly, to be executed. I think that's fascinating, what you've just said about it possibly being a sort of novel almost like a novelized screenplay uh because of course the difference between a book and a film is that you'll never insight you cannot get inside a character's head in a movie unless you have a cheesy kind of voiceover um but i i would argue that everything hammett did in terms of what he

left out psychologically, that lack of psychological insight was completely deliberate. I agree. He talked about this later on. And it was a technique which he called meiosis, which was something he learned in his advertising days that's basically less is more. That if you hold back and you understate stuff, you actually increase the impression. You actually make a greater impression by understating stuff, you actually increase the impression. You actually make a greater impression by understating stuff. Less is more, basically. And I think it was completely

deliberate. When it comes down to it, Hammett creates what is perceived as, very important phrase, what is perceived as a non-literary genre by bringing to it all his reading and ideas and the discipline of literature yeah you know it's all very well him saying to blanche not full as luck would have it i've got a film deal so obviously i'm gonna you know write but fundamentally what writer can actually do that it's much more likely that he just simply pairs back some of the things he was going to do anyway which are coming from a place of having read Kant at the age of 13 and Henry I mean the idea that of all the writers in the world who would influence such a paired back style Henry James is the one and yet you can kind. And yet you can kind of see it.

You can kind of see it because of the psychological consistency of it. So John, what does happen to Dashiell after he has this huge success? Dashiell, of course, whose real name we should point out is Samuel, which I'm not sure that's a coincidence. I'm not sure that's a coincidence.

Where do you get your ideas from, Mr. Hammett? Yeah, we should say DeShiel is, the reason we're calling him DeShiel is, we will play a small clip of Lillian Hellman, his partner, later on. And she's interviewed by Dick Cavett in 1973. And she says it was DeShiel. She says it's an old Maryland name.

So he was born and brought up in Maryland. His father was a feckless alcoholic. He loved his mother, but his mother suffered from TB. He also ended up suffering from TB. So he's kind of early. He had to leave school at 14, despite being bright, because he had to go and earn money. And as we've sort of picked up, he earned that through writing

Pulp Fiction. He became a Pinkerton detective. There's also the theory that maybe a lot of his writing was because he had to write those very terse reports, that maybe that also contributed to his famously sort of terse exterior observed prose style. And then Andy has already alluded to the fact that he couldn't work as a detective because he was ill,

but then he writes The Maltese Falcon, and it becomes a massive hit. It's the worst, best thing that could have happened to him. Yeah. Right? Because suddenly, be careful what you wish for. worst best thing that could have happened to yeah right you know he because suddenly you know be careful what you wish for he's got all he's acclaimed he's a bestseller people are making films of his stuff he has all the money he could possibly desire to spend on anything other than

writing more books it seems to me right know, there are no deadlines anymore. And gradually it peters out, right? The creativity seems to drain away from him. It's a mixture, as I understand it, of exactly what you've just said, Andy, plus ill health, plus the fact that he was being crucified by the government and had to fight against, you know, I mean, did he actually go up? Did he go up before House Unlimited?

He did, and he went to prison as well. He went to prison, yeah, later in his life. And like Spade, like Sam Spade, I mean, it's a very easy comparison to make, but he refused to bow down. He just refused to crumble in the face of this terrible persecution. So, I mean, I think writing kind of went on the back burner for a while. Yeah. He also, it's worth saying, I get the impression from what I've read

that the writing was drying up when he meets Lillian Helmer. Yeah, yeah. And he devotes the energy that might have gone into his own creativity, he devotes to her in a very forward-thinking way. creativity he devotes to her in a very forward-thinking way. It's him who, it's Hammett who provides Lillian Hellman with the idea that for her play The Children's Hour, which becomes this one of the most important American plays of the 20th century, and it's Hammett who edits that. There are notes of his edits, you know, he's deeply involved with the creation of that play. That's not to take credit away from Lillian Hellman,

but nevertheless, that is a collaborative project. And in turn, his interest in the Communist Party, he's sort of kind of, he's kind of, the writing is dried up. So he throws himself into being a figurehead for that, for the various organisations and then in turn becomes persecuted, Mark, as you say. He does. I mean, it's interesting.

When he meets, obviously, Hellman and he fall in love, have a famously tempestuous relationship. He is already drinking, but he drinks even more when they're together. But, I mean, his last hurrah, really, and it was a fairly kind of successful hurrah, it lasted him at least 15 years in terms of money. He creates Nick and Nora Charles. Nick is an alcoholic, basically an alcoholic detective. The Thin Man, played brilliantly by William Holden in the movies, and Myrna Loy plays Nora. And that gets turned into what we would now call a franchise. I think there's six or seven Thin Man movies, and it goes on right into the 1950s. good money and he's hanging out through Lillian Hellman with the Fitzgeralds and you know the kind of the the set that he's always felt he ought to be part of but as Andy says it's somehow in the

middle of all that his ability to write fiction disappears he he and the thin man is not really let's be honest it's many things it's romantic comedy but it's not hard it's not hardball it's not Sam Spade no we talked about Lillian Hellman should we hear from lillian hellman now we've got a clip from her on a uh you said it was the dick cabot show did you in the 70s yeah and i should i should set this up is that basically andre g and gertrude stein and all the all the kind of the cool kids in paris for for reasons that we can only speculate, pick out Hammett as being one of the great American novelists. And I think it was in 1935, they get to meet Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Tockless in New York.

I remember she gave me a very unpleasant look. I was sitting with her and Hammett on a couch. She said to Hammett, you write about women better than any other American writer. And Dash very pleasantly said, maybe because of Lillian. And she said, who? Turned and stared at him. Well, that relationship was, as we know,

a stormy and tempestuous one. I think what you i think what you just said is very interesting john about uh once the writing dried up it's it's hard not to speculate self-loathing would be putting it too strongly but it's hard not to think that like like many writers who suddenly find themselves successful with what they do not consider their best work yeah the balteseese Falcon was not his favorite novel. It really wasn't. And suddenly that's being filmed everywhere.

It's a huge bestseller. And then the Thin Man stuff happens. And as you say, suddenly he's at the center of a franchise. And he kind of loses the spark. He kind of, you know, that's not what I wanted to be successful for. Not unlike Salinginger in so far right salinger becomes phenomenally successful for a book that he considers a warm-up to more interesting things yeah and capturing the ride for its author it just becomes a colossal pain

in the ass yeah an albatross a massive lovely passage in a piece in 2018 in the Paris Review by Annie De Beale. And this sort of captures that although he didn't write anything, she makes the case that his life post, you know, post the glory years weren't empty. Hammett didn't publish anything in the 26 years between The Thin Man and his death, but he wasn't idle. He drank prodigiously. He edited his lover Lillian Hellman's plays. He joined the Communist Party.

He taught a mystery writing class. He joined the army again. He stopped drinking. He was called to testify before the House of Un-American Activities Committee. He was found guilty of contempt of court and sent to prison. He maintained relationships with Josephine and his daughters and with Lillian, who became more of a friend than a lover. He had other lovers. He adored his grandchildren. He fished. He made his own fishing lures. He took up sketching and photography. He read. There is

tragedy in his not writing, only in that he tried. He struggled for decades to finish a novel tulip and never did. It was published, wasn't it, eventually, Tulip, the unfinished novel? Yeah, was it? Yeah, it was. The other thing to say, for anybody listening to this who's never read any Hammett, much as we've been talking about The Maltese Falcon. Red Harvest.

The other books. I mean, Red Harvest is just astonishing. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the biggest crime writing award that's awarded annually in Scandinavia, where they do take their literary... It's called The Glass Key, which is another fabulous, fabulous Hammett novel.

Well, look, I know everyone is on tenterhooks for our quiz. I certainly am. Okay, so what we're going to do is... Experts have identified, as I said, 20 songs by Elvis Costello. 20! 2-0! 20 songs by Elvis Costello. 20, 2-0. 20 songs by Elvis Costello. And the reason why this is so interesting is, of course,

our guest, Mark Billingham, is, I happen to know, a huge fan of Elvis Costello. I happen to know John Mitchinson is a huge fan of Elvis Costello. I myself am a huge fan of Elvis Costello. Nicky Birch is not a huge fan of Elvis Costello. So that's going to be very interesting. And also, I'd like to say, occasionally, Backlist did his, hang on, I myself am a huge fan of Elvis Costello. Nicky Birch is not a huge fan of Elvis Costello, so that's going to be very interesting. And also I'd like to say occasionally Backlisted is criticised for being a bit blokey, and I always reject that criticism passionately.

It really annoys me and gets under my skin. Well, that's not the case for the next five minutes. So the great things about podcast is if this is too much, just fast forward it. Just fast forward it five minutes. We're going to have this little bit of fun now. So, Nicky, are you ready? I've got to say, Andy, this is so niche. I mean, I actually did Elvis Costello as my specialist subject

on Celebrity Mastermind. And the connection with Dashiell Hammett never came up. I love it. There's a great connection with Joe Strummer, though. Did you know about the Joe Strummer connection? When Strummer was ill, very seriously

ill in hospital with TB, I think, at one point, the book he chose to read was The Maltese Falcon. I did not know that. Okay, that's very good. Just before you start and i uh and i reveal my kind of you know amazing knowledge of uh elvis costello songs or not i also have to say that i've only watched the film as well so this is puts me in a really and that was a while ago okay so anything i get i'm going to be impressed with myself nikki is everything to play for. Remember, guess, Nikki. Everything to play for.

Right, so the way we're going to run this quiz, such as we were, such as we're going to fall to pieces fast, don't worry, is I'm going to ask Nikki, then John, then our guest Mark, to name one of the 20 songs of Elvis Costello inspired by Dashiell Hammett's novel, The Maltese Falcon. Admittedly, as Mark said earlier, are these loosely inspired by? Very loose, Mark.

Very, very loosely indeed. Okay. So, Nicky, see you. A song by Elvis Costello which is inspired by The Maltese Falcon, please. Okay. I know three Elvis Costello songs. So I'm going to go with Watching the Detectives. You are right.

I think you're on safe ground there. John? Trust. It's not a song. It's an album. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Expelled.

He's out. Nicky did better than you, Mitch. Well done. Right. It's between Nicky and Mark Billingham. Right, Mark, go. Okay, well, I'm going to go very loosely with Battered Old Bird. Yes!

Battered Old Bird, the Maltese Falcon Magnificent. Nicky, back to you. The other song I know is Alison, but I don't know if there's an Alison in Maltese Falcon. What's your third Elvis Costello song? Oliver's Army. Yes. That is not one of those either.

I mean, I'd love to find some way in which it by default Mark is going to win this but I know he can come up with a new goal it may not be on your list it may yeah you're out

you're out you're done you trust you're out you're done so I can't even say man out of time no

no that wasn't on this because there are because there are at least two at least two in the Maltese Falcon I'm going to go with The Impostor. Yes, you are correct that we have that on our list.

Okay, Mark Billingham wins our quiz, which is only right, as it should be. John, Nicky, Mark, are there any others you would like to just throw into the ring? Well, okay, I want to know what's on your list. Tell me the album. Tell me the album, and let's see if we can guess the tracks. Punch the Clock, there's guess the tracks Punch the Clock

there's a track from Punch the Clock King of Thieves correct third track side one I think Armed Forces

third track side one Armed Forces no that's that is the third track side one I think I've got this wrong it's Goon Squad

Goon Squad I'll just give you the rest I Stand Accused Possession The Beat Shot With His Own Gun Boy With A Problem Worthless Thing Boy With A Problem right yeah i'll just give you the rest i stand accused yeah possession yeah the beat shot with his own gun boy with a problem worthless thing yeah by chris tifford elisha cook jr elisha cook jr is a boy with a problem okay okay yeah worthless thing uh good yeah uh crimes of paris because it's

plaster of paris so that's the bird isn't uh it? It's made of lead, Andy. Heathen town. The bird's made of lead. Oh, yeah. Okay. Experts are forced. We've had enough of experts. This offer is unrepeatable. Okay. Kind of murder.

My all-time doll. American gangster time. Complicated shadows. Alibi. And, of course, spooky girlfriend. Yeah. So, okay. So if you've just fast forwarded this segment, we're back.

We're back. The show is now open to everyone again. Welcome back. I'd love to think he's a fan. I would love to think that Elvis is a fan. I reckon, come on, Mark. Elvis is all kidding aside. She's filing her nails while they're dragging the lake.

Elvis's songs are full of references to crime, tropes, fiction, novelists. I always wanted to ask you, do you think you were ever inspired yourself by, because I know how much you love Elvis. Do you think that little bit of that snuck into your, the way you see the world and think about it? Well, the thing in all seriousness has always attracted me to Costello are the lyrics. I mean, you know, he's an amazing songwriter, but the sort of, the stories that are not obvious.

It's just, Kind of Murder, which is a song you just mentioned, is absolutely that. You just, you listen to the lyrics of that song and you a song you just mentioned is one is, is, is absolutely that you just, you listen to the lyrics of that song and you go, what the hell is going on? And you think you've got a handle on it. And you start, you know, oddly, there is a, uh, a collection of short stories being published next year called brutal and strange, uh, short stories based on the songs of Elvis Costello. And it's coming out next year. And I've, I've, I've written a song based on, uh, I've written a story based on the song, our Costello. And it's coming out next year. And I've written a story based on the song Our Little Angel.

Again, nothing to do with the song, just what that song made me think. And he does that better than anybody. And to think people would level criticism that this bit was irrelevant. Irrelevant or blokey. It's ridiculous. It was so tied in, so tied into the heart of the show.

I can't believe it. Well, anyway, Johnny. And I'm afraid it's time now for us to climb into the battered, backlisted jalopy and leave Dashiell Hammett and Sam Spade on the street corner. Huge thanks to Mark for guiding us through the mean streets of this wonderful novel and to Nicky Birch for helping us sound like the wisecracking wiseacres we aspire to be.

If you would like show notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the 187 that we've always recorded and the 187 that we've already recorded, please visit our website at backlisted.fm. If you want to buy the books discussed, visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose backlist as your book shop and we're still keen to hear from you on twitter facebook or instagram if you want to hear backlisted without ads subscribe to our patreon www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted your subscription brings other benefits if you subscribe at the lock listener level for less than the price of a plate of pickled pig's feet at john's Grill, you'll get two extra exclusive podcasts every month.

We call it Lock Listed because it began in the Wenlock Tavern just before lockdown, and it features the three of us talking and recommending the books, films, and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight. People who subscribe at this level also get their names read out, accompanied by lashings of thanks and gratitude, like this. Rob Annadale. Thank you. Tessa Coolick. Thanks, Tessa. Gillian Roach.

Thank you, Gillian. Jennifer Langley. Thank you, Jennifer. And Sue Mendes. Thank you. Alice Lancaster. Monica Rookholt. Thank you.

Nicola Peck. Thank you. Gretchen Rubin. Thank you. keep it sincere Johnny come on and oh Jesus we are sincere

we love you and Duncan thank you everybody thank you very much you need a little cheesy theme behind that so it's like our song Simon Bates our tune

yeah do you know what do you know what Nicky do you know what Nicky Marks right could we have some easy listening Elvis Costello the next time we do this?

Yes, that would be great. Just so he can snap along in the background. Nice. And we're delighted to add a new name to the highest moment of all. The Guild of Master Storytellers welcomes Stephen Van Amel. Thank you, Stephen. Thank you very much. Thank you so much.

Well, Mark, before we go, this has been a lot of fun. It's been a hoot, I would go so far as to say. What is the – do you have – is there anything that you feel we haven't said? I mean, there's lots, isn't there, about Hammett or Sam Spade or the Maltese Vulcan? Sam Spade, we've mentioned it more than once, but I think it's absolutely astonishing that this iconic detective was in one book and one book only.

I mean, that to me is just a mark of how important and great this book is. And I'm absolutely thrilled by the fact that you, Andy, who hadn't read it, loved it, and that John, who read it again, loved it even more. You know, it would have been fairly awful if you'd both gone, well, nah, it's not all that is it that would that would be quite a strange episode of backlisted although maybe you've had those i don't know where people have chosen books that you all hated um almost never one famous example

but you can tell me when we finish recording i've just got one little thing can i just read one little thing which i thought was lovely um diana john Johnson the novelist said this lovely thing the heroism of his life lay not in his Horatio Alger success but in the long years after success when money and gifts were gone it is the long blank years that prove the spirit no that's beautiful yeah kind of cool thank you okay well listen thanks everybody and thank you Mark for coming on this has been great thank you Thank you for asking me. It's been a pleasure. Amazing.

See you next time, everybody. See you next time. Bye. See you at Fortnite.