More Gores

I posted two days ago about some of the ways Joe Gores alluded to Dashiell Hammett's life and work in his Spade & Archer, a "prequel" to The Maltese Falcon. Here are two more.

Gores has Sam Spade adopt the alias Nick Charles in one scene. Charles, of course, was the protagonist of Hammett's novel The Thin Man (thought not its title character).

The novel's structure, too, is reminiscent of the 1920s and '30s, when a series of loosely or tightly knot stories published over several issues of Black Mask might later be reissued together as a novel. Frederick Nebel's The Crimes of Richmond City, Paul Cain's superb The Fast One and several of Hammett's own books appeared as serials this way before their publication in book form.

Spade & Archer is presented as three long, linked episodes, set in 1921, 1925 and 1928 (The Maltese Falcon was published in 1929). I don't know if Gores intended this, but it's easy to imagine one is reading three long stories brought together as a novel, in the old Black Mask manner.

(Click here for a thoughtful, highly critical review of the book.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Spade & Archer: The first thirty pages

Here's Dashiell Hammett's famous description of Sam Spade from The Maltese Falcon:

"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-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by the 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 upon his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan."

Here's how Joe Gores picks up — and displaces — the v motif in his new Maltese Falcon prequel, Spade & Archer:

"He had a long bony jaw, a flexible mouth, a jutting chin. His nose was hooked. He was six feet tall, with broad, steeply sloping shoulders. He stayed in the shadows while the scant dozen passengers disembarked from the wooden-hulled steam-powered passenger ferry Virginia V, just in from Seattle via the Colvos Passage. ... The watcher stiffened when the last person off the Virginia V was a solid, broad-shouldered ..."

I'll file that under "clever solution to a problem." An author picking up such a well-known story needs to recreate without copying. I don't know if the boat name Virginia V has any narrative significance, but it certainly alludes to the original's v motif, rekindling memories of Hammett's Spade without descending to word-for-word copying. Damn, that's clever. And if not, it's a hell of a lot of fun.
And remember that line about looking pleasantly like a blond satan? Here's Gores, on page 30 of Spade & Archer: "`You will,' said Spade. His grin made him look pleasantly satanic." Gores takes bits of Hammett's original description and appears to be sprinkling them throughout his own book, an interesting choice that ought to make Hammett readers smile.
I haven't written much about Gores because he's not beyond my borders, but I recommend his DKA Files novels. Of these, 32 Cadillacs and Cons, Scams and Grifts are two of the great comic crime novels ever. The protagonists are repo men and women. How can you beat that?

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And here's a passage from the same chapter that may interest a certain regular reader of this site:

"Yeah, uh, thanks, Sam." Something sly and delighted seemed suddenly to dance in Archer's heavy, coarse voice. "We're living over in Spokane so's she can keep working at Graham's Bookstore ... "

© Peter Rozovsky 2009