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Aug. 8th, 2024 11:23 pmJust finished reading the novel of The Maltese Falcon. I enjoyed it! If you like the movie, which follows it quite closely, I'd recommend it. If you haven't seen the movie, I'd recommend watching it on an airplane. I think the third person limited, without visibility into anyone's thoughts, heightened the similarity in feel to the movie and as well as Sam Spade's apparent lack of emotion. You can definitely recognize a lot of pop culture noir ideas being established here, and the writing is strong and effective.
Somewhere I'd picked up the expectation that the homophobia and fatphobia would be worse than they actually are. Sam's not going to avoid slurring folks about their sexuality when it benefits him, but he's just as cruel about other things, so it sorta feels more natural/less dated than I was expecting. And you could certainly find fault with the narration at points, but the characters are taken seriously and not treated as one-dimensional. And to some extent, you know, it's a novel from 90 years ago. Would you rather have modestly-problematic gay and fat criminals or no gay and fat representation at all?
Tangentially from that, while it's not the authorial intent, the idea of Sam Spade as aromantic has been sorta bouncing around in my head. Like, he's got the noir dynamic of several attractive women falling over him and him sorta brushing it off and even when being positive responding in a cool, sorta dispassionate way, and the whole way he's like "even if I might be in love I'm not going to let it cause me to make bad decisions, I know what happens to people who make bad decisions when they think they're in love" at the end. It doesn't really hold water textually, but the lack of insight into what Sam's really thinking does create more ambiguity than you'd otherwise get, I do think it could be an interesting angle to explore in modern noir works.
All in all I think it's a strong novel even beyond its influence on later works and I'm glad to have read it.
Somewhere I'd picked up the expectation that the homophobia and fatphobia would be worse than they actually are. Sam's not going to avoid slurring folks about their sexuality when it benefits him, but he's just as cruel about other things, so it sorta feels more natural/less dated than I was expecting. And you could certainly find fault with the narration at points, but the characters are taken seriously and not treated as one-dimensional. And to some extent, you know, it's a novel from 90 years ago. Would you rather have modestly-problematic gay and fat criminals or no gay and fat representation at all?
Tangentially from that, while it's not the authorial intent, the idea of Sam Spade as aromantic has been sorta bouncing around in my head. Like, he's got the noir dynamic of several attractive women falling over him and him sorta brushing it off and even when being positive responding in a cool, sorta dispassionate way, and the whole way he's like "even if I might be in love I'm not going to let it cause me to make bad decisions, I know what happens to people who make bad decisions when they think they're in love" at the end. It doesn't really hold water textually, but the lack of insight into what Sam's really thinking does create more ambiguity than you'd otherwise get, I do think it could be an interesting angle to explore in modern noir works.
All in all I think it's a strong novel even beyond its influence on later works and I'm glad to have read it.
