Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

Apart from “The Continental Op” represented in Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett,
under the pseudonym Peter Collinson, also created other enduring characters, namely Nick
and Nora Charles (from The Thin Man) or the even more popular Sam Spade, the leading
character in the novel and several film adaptations of The Maltese Falcon. Sam Spade,
who is most directly associated with the quintessential noir actor Humphrey Bogart, turned
out to be the model detective-hero. Again, Spade and other American hard-boiled heroes
provided an alternative to and a break from the conventional detective hero that dominated
in murder mystery novels and films throughout the silent era and into the thirties. Both in
the novel and in John Huston’s film, Spade appears sometimes as a hard or even an
egoistical competitor, and comes across as being as amoral as the criminals he defeats. On
the whole, Sam Spade is a pitiless hero, showing no grief at all, for instance, when he
learns that his partner has been cruelly killed or even when he refuses to inspect the body
and get some clues to the identity of the murderer. His lack of affect is accentuated further
when, the day after the murder, he orders his secretary to have Archer’s name removed
from the office premises (doors, windows and his desk as well).
However, we then see the other side of Spade’s personality, one that shows signs of
heroism, revealing devotion, professional conscientiousness, and honesty. I too believe that
what seems to be the compromised code of the detective character is actually symptomatic
of Hammett’s higher honesty. By adopting this simple code personified in Spade as his
highest ideal, it is his first and only line of defence (which became Hammett’s famous
quote) against an intimidating world: “Listen, when a man’s partner’s killed, he’s supposed
to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was
your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it”, he says to Brigid
O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), turning her in after she confesses that she had killed Archer.
This philosophy also marked Hammett’s integrity when he was questioned about
his communist contacts, as he simply refused to reveal them. In several passages, as in this
one, which reiterates the moral foundation of the hard-boiled code, one can see that
Hammett’s language was hard-bitten, like crime journalism, leaving the readers to make
their own judgements. The Maltese Falcon is in this sense a good example of the objective
style, and again as readers, we build up our own impressions of what goes on inside
Spade’s mind, often misreading the ways he acts as in the example above. There are other
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