The Last Book I Read

I discovered Dashiell Hammett's work back when I was in high school. I'd somehow come across Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, which led me to seek out the rest of his novels and stories. One of the collections of his pulp stories also included an essay called "The Fine Art of Murder" which was his treatise on the development of the hard-boiled school of authors, and the clear hero in this account was this guy with the odd name of Dashiell Hammett. So I started checking out his books too. After devouring them all (at the time I believe that only his five novels and one short story collection were available), I started looking around for the next great author in that tough, gritty genre. A few omnibuses featuring work by fellow Black Mask pulp writers turned up a couple of candidates (Norbert Davis and Frank Gruber were two I recall), but they either never produced longer works, or they proved disappointing aside their short stories. Eventually I did discover James M. Cain, but while his novels were in the same ballpark stylistically, his plots tended to soap opera and that wasn't so appealing to me. So over the years I came to believe that after Chandler and Hammett, there's a pretty big drop-off in the hard-boiled detective school.

Spade & Archer is a really fine attempt to recapture the air and voice of Hammett's best known work, The Maltese Falcon. Gores has been down this road before-- back in the seventies, I read his novel imagining Hammett's own transition from Pinkerton operative to author, just titled Hammett. Wim Wenders later turned that into a pretty decent film (and I still hope he someday undertakes a movie version of Hammett's Red Harvest, set in rough and rowdy Butte, America in the years after World War I). Anyway, Gores recent effort is actually a prequel to The Maltese Falcon, providing a back story for its protagonist Sam Spade (I find it difficult not to picture him as a dead ringer for Humphrey Bogart, who played the character in the 1940 John Huston-directed film). It's no insult to say that Gores is no Hammett, but he's a good story-teller with a great skill for setting the scene, in this case San Francisco in the 1920s. One difference between him and Hammett, from my perspective, is that while Hammett wrote detective stories, Gores writes mysteries. The difference is in the emphasis-- whether one focuses more on character or plot development. Because it's less likely to be constrained by genre conventions, I'm inclined to find the former more interesting, and that's where Hammett excelled. Gores is better in the latter area, so the story is compelling, but occasionally seems like little more than the sprinkling of clues (I guessed the bad guy at the start of the last part of the novel) with characters doing things not because of who they are but because of what needed to be done at that moment. It helps of course, when you are dealing with characters (or, at least the main character) whose persona is already pretty well known to the reader. Again, I don't want to say this is a major fault-- no one working the in the hard-boiled tradition should bristle at falling short in a comparison with Hammett. This book doesn't make me want to go out and find everything else that Gores has written, but I was genuinely entertained throughout, and am glad I read it.