US – Simpler Pastimes

The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett

The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett
US, 1930 (serialized starting 1929)

Image of the first edition cover of The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. Yellow background with black and white graphic of falcon on the left and a hand holding what appears to be orange-colored beads and coins on the right.

I am perplexed.

A hardboiled classic, originally serialized in the magazine Black Mask, The Maltese Falcon spins a tale of treachery, murder, and deceit. From the moment private investigator Sam Spade is hired by a Miss Wonderly (whom we soon learn to actually be Brigid O’Shaughnessy, a classic femme fatale) he is spun through a high-speed tale of adventure and misdeeds, trying to keep up with the complex web of interactions between O’Shaughnessy, criminal Joel Cairo, Cairo’s employer Casper Gutman, and Gutman’s henchman Wilmer Cook as they all seek the titular falcon.

It is a novel with few redeeming characters: O’Shaughnessy continuously lies, disseminates, and withholds information; Cook is clearly a killer; Cairo is always looking to get out of a deal; and Gutman will stop at nothing to get to the falcon, including selling out his associates. And Spade himself is sleazy, not only bending (at best) the law to solve his case, but he objectifies every woman he meets. Workplace sexual harassment, example A, which I assume to have been…commonplace…in his time. But it is the seediness of the characters which directs the action. Nice people aren’t typically criminals, or perhaps so good at investigating them.

It doesn’t perplex me that the mystery is enjoyable (at least if crime fiction is your thing). What mystifies me, at least a bit, is the acclaim that seems to surround it: per the Wikipedia page, The Crime Writers’ Association ranked it 10^th in their 1990 list of Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time, and in 1995 3^rd by the Mystery Writers of America. (LibraryThing shows it #2 on the MWA list, so I don’t know which source is correct.) Although I find it difficult to rank books, I have a hard time personally believing it is better than say, The Hound of the Baskervilles (CWA list) or And Then There Were None (both lists).*

It certainly isn’t for the writing, which I found rather plain and pedestrian, sometimes even distracting. The dialogue was better, I thought, than the descriptive text. It read to me more like a screenplay, which perhaps may be a reason it’s been adapted to film so often, most notably in 1941, starring Humphrey Bogart. (Side note – I saw the film a couple of years back but didn’t really remember it, other than in the flashes of recognition as I read the book. Don’t know if that says more about me or the movie…)

And while I ripped through it, there were times when it seemed like Hammett failed to connect dots, making it difficult to follow just what exactly was going on. Charitably, perhaps this was his intent–to make us feel as confused as Spade–but I personally feel Margery Allingham did a better job at conveying her protagonist’s amnesia-triggered confusion without making it unintelligible to the reader in Traitor’s Purse. That said, I do wonder if perhaps the mystery—the confusion of twists, turns, and red herrings before finally arriving at Spade’s final surprising discovery—is what ranks it so high. Predictable it is not.

What I don’t know, exactly, is where it stands in the pantheon of hardboiled crime fiction. Perhaps for its type, it IS a good example, perhaps it is one of the earliest, the one that set the standards? I simply don’t know. A tempting investigation to follow up on… This thought still doesn’t seem what would push it above so many other worthy mysteries, however. So I remain perplexed, if with a much longer mysteries to-read list…

Have you read The Maltese Falcon? Agree/disagree with me or with the crime writers? I’m curious to know.

* Actually, browsing these lists, I find more surprises that raise my eyebrows a bit, especially on the MWA list. On the other hand, maybe this could be a fun reading project.

Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather

Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather
US, 1927

This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape. (“The Mass at Ácoma”)

It has been many years since I last read Willa Cather and I barely remember a thing about what I read, her two great novels of the northern Midwest, My Antonia and O Pioneers. But I have a vague recollection that the setting, the place, was important. Certainly, the same is true of Death Comes for the Archbishop, where the setting and scenery seem to be a character of themselves. Her writing of the scenery is vivid and despite having never been closer to New Mexico than photos of national parks, I was transported completely from a chill dreary gray January to a dusty gold and red southwest.

Death Comes for the Archbishop is not what I would call a traditional novel. It is fiction, yes, and there are consistent characters—the bishop (later archbishop), Jean Marie Latour and his vicar, Joseph Vaillant—and there is passage of time. However, the structure is episodic, and the plot, as such, could be described as “the life of Jean Marie Latour in New Mexico.” Even the construction of a cathedral of Santa Fe, which the book jacket of my copy suggested to be a major element, was confined to a couple episodes—just one part of a life’s work.

The scene of action varies across the desert southwest, throughout the large territory of the new diocese of New Mexico, in an age and place when travel was difficult and slow. It was a bit mind-boggling, I must admit, to read of characters traveling back to Rome or who sent frequent letters to family members in Europe when in their daily lives they depended on mules to get from one village to another. And we complain about the hassles of air travel!

Just as important as the locale is the time: New Mexico is only recently added to the United States, having been part of first the Spanish Empire and then Mexico for many years. The resentments are many: the Mexico diocese at loosing part of their religious territory, the locals at losing their Mexican identity, between newly arrived white Americans and natives, both indigenous (Hopi, Navajo) and Mexican, between established priests and their new leadership. Violence occasionally festers and injustices are not unknown. Yet there is somehow still a peace about Latour and his running of the diocese. Cather took for her inspiration for the character, the real first archbishop of New Mexico, Jean-Baptiste Lamy, and while I don’t know whether he was as wholly admirable as his fictional counterpart, in Cather’s hands he recognizes the wrongs of slavery and the treatment of the native peoples by the newcomers. Yet to talk of all these parts—setting, time, characters—doesn’t seem to add up to the whole. Death Comes for the Archbishop was one of those books that I found absolutely transporting, and one of the very, very few that I’ve ever felt an impulse to flip back to the beginning and restart immediately. Certain to make my end of year favorites list in what is proving a standout reading year.

(The first of several posts for books read much this years, posts drafted, and unaccountably left to sit.)

Selections from The Collected Stories – Eudora Welty

Collected Stories, selections
Eudora Welty
(US, 1941-1963)

I don’t often read much in the way of short stories—though perhaps I should rectify that—but my in-person book club read a selection of the American Southern writer Eudora Welty’s short stories for our January meeting. The stories were a mix—some more humorous, some more tragic, often a mix of both. They were almost all very “southern” in tone, texture, characterization, and setting. “The Bride of Innisfallen” is a notable exception, with a cast of characters bound via train and then ferry en route from London to Cork, Ireland, as is “Circe,” a retelling of one of the episodes from The Odyssey, but from the woman’s perspective.

Place was clearly an important element. The stories were never set in just a generic US South, but in specific locations—towns, streets, buildings, trails—and mostly in Welty’s home state of Mississippi. Characters ranged across economic and racial spectrums. Clearly, Welty was an acute observer of human nature, and the stories she told feel grounded in a solid reality. She manifested an incredible ability in her stories to represent so many different viewpoints and perspectives, be it an elderly impoverished and nearly blind black grandmother, navigating her way through the equally treacherous waters of the forested path she must take and her dealings with local white folk who may be more dangers still (“A Worn Path”), or a bigoted white man who takes it into his head that he needs to kill a local civil rights leader (“Where is the Voice Coming From?”).

My particular favorites were “Why I Live at the P.O.,” “Powerhouse,” “A Worn Path,” “The Wide Net,” and “Moon Lake,” however, on reflection—both in this writing, and on attending book club—I realize that I have only scratched the surface of Welty’s writing, both in quantity, but, perhaps more importantly, in my understanding of the reading, skimming the surface without diving beneath. Clearly, I have more to explore.

Stories read:
“Petrified Man”
“Why I Live at the P.O.”
“The Hitch-Hikers”
“A Curtain of Green”
“Death of a Traveling Salesman”
“Powerhouse”
“A Worn Path”
“The Wide Net”
“The Purple Hat”
“Livvie”
“Moon Lake”
“The Bride of Innisfallen”
“Circe”
“Where is the Voice Coming From?”

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith
US, 1943

“But poverty, starvation and drunkenness are ugly subjects to choose. We all admit these things exist. But one doesn’t write about them.”
“What does one write about?” Unconsciously, Francie picked up the teacher’s phraseology.
“One delves into the imagination and finds beauty there. The writer, like the artist, must strive for beauty always.”
“What is beauty?” asked the child.
“I can think of no better definition than Keats’: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.'”
Francie took her courage into her two hands and said, “Those stories are the truth.”
“Nonsense!” exploded Miss Garnder. Then, softening her tone, she continued: “By truth, we mean things like the stars always being there and the sun always rising and the true nobility of man and mother-love and love for one’s country,” she ended anti-climatically.
Chapter 39

I didn’t need to know that Betty Smith started her 1943 classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as a memoir before fictionalizing it to feel that this scene late in the novel between protagonist Francie Nolan and her 8th grade English teacher was drawn from Smith’s own life. It has the ring of a bitter personal experience, and the novel itself becomes the refutation, bringing vividly to life characters and neighborhood that Miss Garnder considers “sordid” but told in a manner and style that while not shirking from the difficulties of poverty and alcoholism in early 20th century Brooklyn, still manages a certain gentleness in the telling.

I suspect this is because the novel is from Francie’s point of view. It opens when she is 11 and moves back in forth in time, from when her parents are dating to when she is grown and leaving home. And while an adult Francie may recognize just how tough life was for the child, and for her mother, to the child of 11, rounding up scrap for the junk man to earn a few pennies for candy, everything in life is still an adventure to be discovered. She will grow to recognize that the world does not always see her life as she does–where she sees how loving and talented her father is, the world sees him as a good-for-nothing drunk; where her aunt is condemned for her “fast” ways, she sees a woman capable of great kindness and motherly love. This contrasting of views and Francie’s growing awareness of how others see her and her family contribute to what feels a very realistic portrait of a second-generation Irish-American family.

In her Hudson Review essay, “The Hungry Artist: Rereading Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (helpfully pointed out by Amateur Reader(Tom)), Joyce Zonana posits that A Tree Grows in Brooklyn hasn’t received more scholarly notice in part because it deals with female hungers (literal and metaphorical), but I can’t help but wonder if the gentleness I feel reading it is a contributing factor. Although we know–depending on the quality of our imaginations and emphathies, can perhaps even feel–that the Nolans are poor, that they are starving, the visceralness of this reality is tempered by its coating, sandwiched between genuine loving moments between family members, games Katie Nolan makes up to distract her children from their hunger, and nostalgia-tinged descriptions of neighborhood customs and events. This all contributes to the realism and honesty of the novel, but without turning it into an “issue” novel that might get more press.

By turns moving or amusing, lighthearted or heartbreaking, innocent or dark, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is not a heavily plotted novel, though many things occur. It is a bildungsroman and a series of vignettes that make up a life. That Francie’s life will turn out better than her parents we can but hope, with her mother and grandmother, though we can never be assured. The events in her life and those of her neighbors and relatives make it only too plain that only one wrong turn–a poor decision or an unlucky stroke–can make everything wrong. On the other hand, the opportunities made available to Francie and her brother Neeley thanks to their mother’s insistence on their education–which in the 1910s means even just graduating from grammar school (8th grade), make clear that the possibilities are so much more open to the young generation than their parents or grandparents ever had. It is a vision of the American Dream, not that the child will be the leader of the land, but that the will–and can–do better than the parent.

It did feel as if the ending was a bit rushed. Perhaps this is reflective of life–Francie notes when she turns twelve, that all of a sudden things like Christmas, that once seemed so far away now really do seem to be just around the corner. But it felt more as if as Francie grew older Smith could no longer find much of interest–the adventures of imagining and childhood are behind–and felt the need to quickly wrap up a somewhat lengthy book. This is a minor quibble, though, in what was otherwise an excellent start to my reading year.

This title qualifies as a book by a woman for Back to the Classics 2022.

Native Son by Richard Wright

Native Son
Richard Wright
US, 1940

He hated his family because he knew that they were suffering and that he was powerless to help them. He knew that the moment he allowed himself to feel to its fulness how they lived, the shame and misery of their lives, he would be swept out of himself with fear and despair. So he held toward them an attitude of iron reserve; he lived with them, but behind a wall, a curtain. And toward himself he was even more exacting. He knew that the moment he allowed what his life meant to enter fully into his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else. So he denied himself and acted tough.
Book 1: Fear

Richard Wright’s Native Son is not a seasonal read. It is brutal, in violence and emotion. It is the story of–part of the story of–Bigger Thomas, a young Black man in 1930s Chicago: fearful, angry, and without hope. The relief agency finds him a job as a chauffer for a rich white family, the Daltons, whose wealth comes from real estate, including controlling shares in the company that owns the rat-infested apartment building in which the Thomas family lives. Throw the Daltons’ daughter, Mary, a beautiful, rebellious wild-child flirting with Communism (or more than flirting) into the mix and there is a recipe for disaster. The disaster comes quickly, with an act of (accidental, though predictable) violence at the end of the first part of the novel, followed by ever-more panicked and foolish decisions on the part of Bigger and the inevitable consequences.

The novel, in three parts–Fear, Flight, Fate–is seen entirely through Bigger’s eyes. Although narrated in the third person, we are privy to Bigger’s thoughts, his feelings, his fears, his angers. And it is not a pleasant place to dwell. Bigger is angry. He is afraid. He hates all white people, doesn’t understand them. He sees no real hope, has no happiness, embraces violence. He never seems to empathize, rarely seems to care about anything beyond himself. And yet, it is a tribute to Wright’s bravery and ability as a writer, that this distasteful character is given a measure of humanity–by exposing all of Bigger’s thoughts and feelings to the reader–such that I found myself actually concerned with his fate (though to be honest, I would likely be less emphatic with a real-life Bigger).

Wright does this in part by making Bigger’s motivations and feelings understandable. Not only has Bigger lacked for opportunity in life–in the last section of the novel we learn that he had dreams as a kid, which he knew were impossible merely because of the color of his skin–but he has also had very little interaction with white people, and none of it positive. He can see the white world only as oppressive. It is no wonder he reacts with confusion to the attempts of kindness on the parts of Mr. and Mrs. Dalton and by Mary. But this kindness is also a problem. It’s not just that it’s new to Bigger, it comes across to me as, if not condescending, at least misguided. The elder Daltons’ seek to help “the Negros” philanthropically, but without an understanding of what is really needed and without an acknowledgement of their complicity in the system (specifically in this novel, of redlining and segregation) that makes this very philanthropy necessary. Mary’s motivations may be more genuine–she speaks of equal humanity of the races–, but she often uses phrasing such as “those people,” which feels separating. Mary expresses concerns for the lives of Black people, but there’s still a slight edge of exoticism or condescension to her words, even while you see her trying to learn, saying “[w]e know so little about each other.” Bigger may not be able to put into words precisely his discomfort, but Mary has identified a root of the problem.

A running theme throughout the novel is blindness. It is explicit in the person of Mrs. Dalton, who is physically blind. Bigger uses the term after his crime, thinking that his eyes have been opened (by his actions and how he feels about them after) and that those around him–his family, his friends, his girlfriend Bessie–remain blind. Jan, Mary’s communist boyfriend, doesn’t use the actual word, but he tells Bigger late in the novel that now he “sees.” Wright is not subtle here; this is his purpose for his novel. He is attempting to open his readers’ eyes, to remove their blindness to the ways of the world, to open their understanding.

In some ways I’m surprised that Native Son was selected by the Book of the Month Club in 1940. He did have to edit out a more sexually explicit passage, but even at that, it is still a dark, violent book, and one with positive portrayals of communists and their messaging. It must have been a shock for many of its readers! It is sad that in some ways it remains relevant today–we still are too often blind to the true natures and needs of those unlike us, too many young people still live in fear and anger. I am reminded of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me; he describes the young men of his childhood neighborhood as living in fear and putting on a swaggering persona to mask this fear. It is somewhat concerning to me that it seems possible Bigger may serve to act as a reinforcement of a negative stereotype about young Black men, but Wright’s decision to center such an unappealing character in a novel about revealing the inequities and evils of racism and some of the inevitable consequences makes the book all the more powerful. Native Son is not uplifting, not comforting, not reassuring, but an important read in the pantheon of American 20th century literature.

I read Native Son as part of my Classics Club list and for the “Classic by a Person of Color” category in the Back to the Classics challenge.