STEPHANIE SALTER: Take your time, precious, this book is a masterpiece

By Stephanie Salter
The Tribune-Star

TERRE HAUTE March 01, 2008 09:39 pm

— The fat man was flabbily fat with bulbous pink cheeks and lips and chins and neck, with a great soft egg of a belly that was all his torso, and pendant cones for arms and legs.
— Dashiell Hammett’
“The Maltese Falcon”

David Kipen, the literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts, had the perfect retort to my question about quality and gravitas.
“‘The Maltese Falcon’ is as light or as deep a novel as you care to make it,” he said, by telephone from his office in Washington, D.C.
A devotee of the 1941 film version of the book, I had never actually made my way through Dashiell Hammett’s famous novel about detective Sam Spade. Because it is this year’s national Big Read selection, I decided to give it a go.
My initial reaction was (I’ve since learned) a fairly common one for modern readers who already know the twisting plot and keenly drawn characters of Hammett’s 1929 San Francisco murder tale. I found his hard, relatively spare prose tough to cozy up to.
Images of Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Elijah Cook Jr. were so vivid in my head, I almost hurried through Hammett’s descriptions and asides. Anything that “slowed down” the story I already knew — like a significant anecdote about a man named Flitcraft — annoyed me and made me read faster.
My bad.
While “The Maltese Falcon” is and always will be a heck of a yarn, I realize now it offers a lot more than its plot. As William Kenney, one of hundreds of scholars who have dissected and analyzed the 217-page book, once observed, this is much more than another private-eye endeavor:
“…Hammett in ‘The Maltese Falcon’ reduces the detective element to so minor a role that one hesitates to speak of it as a detective novel at all. It seems, rather, a novel about a detective, quite another thing.”
And a pivotal novel it was. Kipen enthusiastically reminded me that “Falcon” was your basic major bend in the road. Before it, detective-type novels inhabited what Kipen terms a “cheesy pulp genre” that was primitive and shallow.
“But when you think what happened to detective fiction after ‘The Maltese Falcon’ — it elevated the detective story to literature,” he said.
Thursday, Kipen will bring his esteem for Hammett’s book to Terre Haute in this second week of nearly two months of Big Read programs. During a brown-bag luncheon at the main Vigo County Public Library, he will ask and answer, “Why A Falcon?” (see information box).
Kipen will address why the NEA considers “The Maltese Falcon” a “masterwork of American literature.” He also will discuss why Hammett used a falcon as the symbol “of greed and folly” in his story, and why the NEA has dedicated itself to engaging entire communities to read and discuss great works of fiction.
The Big Read began locally Feb. 20 with a Maltese Falcon-decorated table at Arts Illiana’s TableScapes competition. The display, which took top prize at TableScapes, is in the main library lobby throughout this month.
In addition to Kipen’s talk, the next few weeks are jammed with planned Falcon/mystery events. Among them is a free screening at the Community Theatre of John Huston’s fabulous 1941 film (2:30 p.m. Saturday), and a discussion and short movie about the many spin-offs and satires of the detective and film noir genre (12:10 p.m. March 27) at the main library. Indiana State University professor emeritus Gary Daily will host.
A full listing of events can be found at vigo.lib.in.us or at the main library and all branches. As with last year’s book, “The Great Gatsby,” area high schools, universities, organizations and book clubs are participating in the 2008 Big Read. So, too, members of the Air National Guard and student inmates in correctional facilities in Rockville and Carlisle.
Kipen admitted that he, too, missed the art and hard beauty of “The Maltese Falcon” the first time he read it. He was in high school, taking a detective fiction writing class at the University of Southern California.
“I probably preferred Raymond Chandler at the time,” he said.
Many years later, in his duties as book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, Kipen re-read “Falcon” for the 75th anniversary celebration of the publication of the book.
As he wrote in a lengthy and lively essay for the Chronicle (in the archives at sfgate.com), the public and critics once mistook Hammett “for a provider of diverting entertainments.” In retrospect, though, Hammett “looks diverting all right — this former Pinkerton detective helped divert the entire course of American literature, from tea-cozy novelettes to a proletarian realism that prefigured the growing itch of his own social conscience.”
Since the NEA announced “The Maltese Falcon” as its 2008 Big Read, Kipen said, any early hesitation has given way to vociferous support. Positive feedback from communities now rivals an earlier Big Read pick, “To Kill A Mockingbird.”
The primary reason for the national effort is to address “a critical decline in reading for pleasure among American adults,” writes NEA chairman Dan Gioia, in the preface to the program’s reader’s guide. Thus, a book selection must appeal to many tastes. “Falcon” does that.
“Yes, it is a detective novel …” Gioa says. “It’s also a brilliant literary work, as well as a thriller, a love story, and a dark, dry comedy.”
In my cranky haste to finish “The Maltese Falcon,” I missed much of that comedy — in descriptions such as the italicized one above about the fat man villain, Casper Gutman, and in passages of crisp dialogue that must have made for the easiest screen adaptation in Hollywood history.
So complete was Hammett’s story and dialogue, said Kipen, “the joke used to be that John Huston handed the book to his secretary and said, ‘Here, change all the margins on this; we’re shooting Monday.’”
Now that I understand what I missed the first time through, I’ve begun my second journey into “The Maltese Falcon.” As fate would have it, I’ll be in San Francisco for the next two weeks with plenty of vacation time to retrace Sam Spade’s steps and to slow down and enjoy Hammett’s masterpiece. When I return, I’ll be glad to do exactly what the Big Read sticker on the front of the book says, “Pass It On!”

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.