Thursday, January 10, 2013

2013 read #3: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
194 pages
Published 1930
Read January 5
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Jory recommended this one to me way back when I first asked for book suggestions. A mere three and a half months later, here we are. I picked this up on a whim when we went to the library today, and sped through it in just a few hours, the first time since my teen years that I finished a novel in a single day. I had to check several times to assure myself this wasn't an abridged edition.

For whatever reason I always assumed The Maltese Falcon was Serious Literature. I'd never seen any of the film adaptations, and probably conflated it in my head with The Great Gatsby, another 20th century classic I haven't gotten around to reading yet.

In reality, of course, Falcon is pure unadulterated pulp, an entertaining slip of a novel that invented or refined countless cliches of hardboiled detective fiction. In keeping with its period and genre, Falcon's prose is too mechanical and descriptive for my tastes, but that rarely interfered with my enjoyment. I've been meaning to read more pulp -- I want to write something sizzling and fun for BEAT to a PULP magazine, and hope to capture through osmosis the tone and rhythms of good pulp storytelling -- and obviously Falcon did not disappoint. The ending was deliciously cynical.

Beyond that, I don't have much commentary. I'll probably read Hammett's novel Red Harvest soon, as it's bundled together with the library's copy of Falcon and I have a thing for stories set in mining towns. (Hey, maybe my hypothetical pulp story will be set in a mining town! I could write a more red-blooded version of a certain fairy story I'm writing, full of oil-black revolvers and the tiny fists of dames connecting with chiseled jaws to satisfactory effect.)

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