Trudi Canavan once said, “Better to know the quick pain of truth than the ongoing pain of a long-held false hope.” Life would be much easier if the truth was told first before a lie is put in its place to cover up when in reality it creates a much bigger problem than saying the truth from the start. Dashiell Hammett’s, The Maltese Falcon, is a classic example of detective fiction and pulp magazine. Hammett demonstrates this example using: society, corruption, and criminality in San Francisco in the 1920s, explaining the role of the femme fatale in detective fiction, explaining the concept of fear and betrayal, explaining American men’s disillusionment after WWl, and explaining his, Dashiell Hammett’s, history of detective fiction and pulp magazines.
Before Dashiell Hammett began writing detective fiction, Hammett was involved with a corporation known as the Pinkertons’, which in the 1920s is the equivalent of today’s detective. Hammett was inspired by the works of Edgar Allen Poe, to write and create his own novel from what he had experienced in the line of work. Hammett once said, “He felt like somebody had taken the
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lid off life and let him see the works,” implying during Hammett’s time in the Pinkertons’ he experienced many unsuspecting, gruesome, and unforgettable experiences showing Hammett how the real world truly is. Hammett gave readers a big image of how detective fiction works with his experiences in the line of work. Detective fiction blew up in “pulp” magazines. Detective fiction has been around for many, many years. Edgar Allen Poe helped bring out detective fiction to the world with his writing, but Hammett made it blow up in the 1920s using “pulp” magazines. “Pulp” magazines are cheaply made comic books that were sold for cheap. Thousands of people bought them every day for how cheap they were and interesting they became. Hammett wrote parts of the novel and slowly sent them into “pulp” magazine publishers, where he eventually put the whole novel into one book and published it. “Pulp” magazines brought out the most of detective fiction in bringing it out more into the world. Throughout the novel, many characters experience betrayal in some way, shape, or form.
Betrayal is an important aspect of writing a detective fiction, for it creates suspension and gets the reader to be more involved with the story. Betrayal makes the reader rethink certain characters relationships and keeps characters in the back of the reader’s mind.Hammett once stated “When a man’s partner is 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.” Hammett is referencing to the death of Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, who was murdered, eventually Spade finding out it was the women he loved, Brigid, who killed his partner where Spade turns in Brigid to the police in vengeance of his partner’s death and the betrayal he
experienced. Another important aspect of detective fiction is the femme fatale. The femme fatale is usually described as a mysterious and seductive woman who charms her lovers, leading them into compromising, deadly, and dangerous situations. Throughout literature and art, they are known as the archetype. The femme fatale helps bring in more suspension into the story, creating dilemmas wherever she goes, and helping craft the plot into something bigger, without the femme fatale the story wouldn’t be as interesting, for there wouldn’t be anyone to create the drama within the story. After World War l, men became disillusioned when they arrived home. Men felt out of place once they arrived home, for women had taken all the jobs, they proved for the family, women basically became the man of the house for several American men. Men felt the loss of their masculinity and pride, so they had a desire of obtaining that one thing to help them feel like men once again, which turned out being Sam Spade and detective fiction. Sam Spade represented what every man wanted to be: masculine, brave, lawbreaker, carefree, and prideful. Men became more like Sam Spade, for they want to be seen as the men of their homes once again. During the 1920s in San Francisco, the crime rate rose, corruption began rising in many places, and society became a hand full for the government. With women obtaining “more” rights and men becoming more like Sam Spade, San Francisco was going downhill. The crime was on an extreme rise, especially during prohibition. Women began breaking laws and causing mayhem, while men encouraged their actions. With women obtaining “new” rights and trying new things, men and women became like twin annoying twins for the government to handle, while in the government there was corruption itself. Police was paid by gang members and mob bosses to let them run alcoholic bars known as Speakeasies. Police was also involved in murders and covering up for criminals as long as they are paid with a good amount of money.
Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon depicts the fallacious logic of a totalitarian regime through the experiences of Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov. Rubashov had fought in the revolution and was once part of the Central Committee of the Party, but he is arrested on charges of instigating attempted assassinations of No. 1, and for taking part in oppositional, counter-revolutionary activities, and is sent to a Soviet prison. Rubashov, in his idle pacing throughout his cell, recollects his past with the Party. He begins to feel impulses of guilt, most especially in those moments he was required to expel devoted revolutionaries from the Party, sending them to their death. These subconscious feelings of guilt are oftentimes represented physically in the form of toothache or through day- or night-dreams. As his thought progresses with the novel, he begins to recognize his guilt, which emerges alongside his individuality. It remains in his subconscious, and it is not until Rubashov absolves himself through silent resignation at his public trial that he is fully conscious of guilt. By joining the Party, Rubashov allows himself to forget the questions of human nature and of his individuality. The nature of his guilt lies in this betrayal of his individuality.
It is very interesting to note how the conventions of 1940’s hardboiled private eye fiction translate into the 1970’s. The low-rent drabness of the genre loses much of its allure. The dark shadows and long nights of urban Los Angeles become the bright lights and warm sunshine of Malibu beaches. The detective’s normally snappy dialogue turns into joking asides. Marlowe’s hardboiled narration becomes the self-conscious mutterings of a lonely man talking to himself. The romantic myth of a man set apart from the city is turned on its head as a pathetic man living alone with his cat.
In some situations, people become violent because of their emotions. In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Junior leaves his school on the reservation to go to an all white high school. His Indian friends feel betrayed. He joins the basketball team at his new school and the first game is against the reservation team. The Indian crowd throws things at him and he needs stitches on his forehead. During the game, as Junior jumped into the air, he “heard the curses of 200 Spokanes, and saw only a bright light as Rowdy smashed his elbow into my head and knocked me unconscious”. (pg 146) After Junior left the Reservation, Rowdy felt betrayed, and became violently angry. His emotion of betrayal caused him to turn on Junior and act more evil. This is especially hard on him because Junior was his best friend.
The way people act toward each other can cause betrayal to play a huge role in their actions toward one another, which is the first way in which betrayal is portrayed. For example, before they were born, “The twin argued inside of their mother’s stomach and fought about their birth.The right-handed twin wanted to be born the normal way, as most children are born, but the left-handed twin said no and said he saw light in another direction(Iroquois 41),” so the right-handed twin was born naturally while the left-handed twin ended up not being able to go the direction he saw light in was born through his mother’s armpit,
Dashiell Hammett’s novel, The Maltese Falcon, is a hard-boiled detective novel; a subset of the mystery genre. Before the appearance of this sub-genre, mystery novels were mainly dominated by unrealistic cases and detectives like Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. As Malmgren states, “The murders in these stories are implausibly motivated, the plots completely artificial, and the characters pathetically two-dimensional, puppets and cardboard lovers, and paper mache villains and detectives of exquisite and impossible gentility.” (Malmgren, 371) On the other hand, Hammett tried to write realistic mystery fiction – the “hard-boiled” genre. In the Maltese Falcon, Hammett uses language, symbolism, and characterization to bring the story closer to reality.
The story line of Red Harvest is riddled with double-crossing characters, bootleggers and crooked authority figures that obviously challenge universal moral codes of conduct. More importantly, some characters remain more morally ambivalent then others. Although, this is a troupe of hardboiled detective novels from the time, and the Film Noir genre where nothing is as it seems, there are particular characters and events that stand out. The language and situations are so double sided that the reader is forced to question the weave of their own moral fabric. Dashiell Hammett through his writing style is able to reflect on the concerns many had at the time regarding rise in crime and deterioration of Victorian age morals, coincided with the rise of the detective Anti-hero, guilty woman (femme fatal) and vigilantism.
During World War II and the Holocaust, there was not only mistrust for the government but there was also plenty of mistrust for prior friends and neighbors. In the graphic novel, “Maus (Volume I and II) Vladek Spiegelman makes it very clear to his son, Artie, that one cannot count on their friends. He makes the point that in time of hardship, friends will abandon you quite quickly. Vladek says, “Friends? Your friends…if you lock them together in a room with no food for a week…then you could see what it is, friends! (Maus, VI. 5-6). Throughout the novel, we see examples of this gloomy point proven repeatedly.
...ense. All four of those characteristics make up the basis of this genre. “The hard-boiled detective was created in the pages of Black Mask magazine in the early 1920s by Carroll John Daly, a largely forgotten hack. He was immediately followed by Dashiell Hammett, who brought real talent to the genre and gave it literary credentials” (Penzler). Daly also created one of the first series of private eye novels, topping Hammett as one of the most famous authors of that time. Not soon after, the author of “The Big Sleep”, Raymond Chandler, closely trails after Hammett in his novel writing becoming vastly popular. “Raymond Chandler followed Hammett with his immortal Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep and eight subsequent novels. As a pure writer whose use of simile and metaphor has never been equaled, Chandler remains one of the giants of 20thcentury literature” (Penzler).
The Pacific coast port city of San Francisco, California provides a distinctively mysterious backdrop in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Unlike many other detective stories that are anchored in well-known metropolises such as Los Angeles or New York City, Hammett opted to place the events of his text in the lesser-known, yet similarly exotic cultural confines of San Francisco. Hammett used his own intricate knowledge of the San Francisco Bay Area - coupled with details collected during a stint as a detective for the now defunct Pinkerton Agency - to craft a distinctive brand of detective fiction that thrived on such an original setting (Paul 93). By examining the setting of 1920’s San Francisco in The Maltese Falcon, it becomes apparent that one of Hammett’s literary strengths was his exceptional ability to intertwine non-fictional places with a fictional plot and characters in order to produce a logical and exceedingly believable detective mystery.
1964 was a very turbulent year for America; the people were still mourning the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the war in Vietnam, the cold war, race riots, boycotts, the civil rights movement, thermo-nuclear testing, political divisions, violent imagery was increasing on TV and film, a growing drug culture was becoming apparent, and crime rates were rising rapidly (www.historyorb.com). New York City had over 600 murders in 1964 alone (Lemann), and the residents were awash with fear. Yet during this horrendous time in our history, one reporter wrote an article specifically designed to spark moral outrage from the citizens of New York and the world. Martin Gansberg of the New York Times focuses on thirty-eight frightened residents of a middle class neighborhood in Queens, New York and blatantly accused them of indifference while witnessing the brutal attacks on Kitty Genovese, which ultimately led to her death. He used yellow journalism tactics, a term meaning to sensationalize a story with the express goal of selling newspapers, (oxforddictionaries.com) to carefully craft his version of the truth so it would fit this accusation; leaving out important details and falsifying others, he paints a partially accurate (but mostly inaccurate) picture, endangering the prosecution’s murder case against Winston Moseley.
Hard-boiled detective fiction sets the scene for a cold and harsh reality. Dashiell Hammett’s, “The Girl with The Silver Eyes” is no exception to this rule. In this short story Hammett paints a picture of a brutally realistic urban center filled with characters that not many people would want to call friends. The realistic qualities of Hammett’s story are drawn from his own life’s experience working as a Pinkerton detective. The detective in “The Girl With The Silver Eyes” works for the Continental Detective Agency and is, therefore, known simply as the Continental Op. In the beginning of the story the Op professes, “a detective, if he is wise, takes pains to make and keep as many friends as possible among transfer company, express company and railroad employees” (27). This paper will examine this philosophy of the Continental Op, how he employs this approach to detective work and uncover if this approach is beneficial or disadvantageous.
Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most celebrated literary authors of all time, known for writing very suspenseful, dramatic short stories and a poet; is considered as being a part of the American Romantic Movement, and a lesser known opinion is he is regarded as the inventor of the detective-fiction genre. Most recognized for his mystery and macabre, a journey into the dark, ghastly stories of death, deception and revenge is what makes up his reputation. The short story under analysis is a part of his latter works; “The Cask of Amontillado”, a story of revenge takes readers into the mind of the murderer.
According to dictionary.com betrayal means "an act of deliberate disloyalty,”. Betrayal is something that is very prevalent throughout the novel The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini which is a story about the betrayal that a young boy named Amir does to his friend Hassan. Amir shows that he is a betrayer to Hassan when he belittles, plots, refuses to acknowledge their friendship, and walks away from Hassan. With each betrayal listed they progressively get worse and worse as Amir continues to show how little he really cares for Hassan.
The criminal underworld has been an essential aspect of crime fiction since the concept emerged in the mid-eighteenth century. While many authors have constructed their own idealistic conceptualizations of the criminal underworld, they have implemented distinct boundaries between the “good” and “evil” features of society. These opposing “worlds” often intertwine when the protagonist, a crusader for good, is thrust into the hellscape of society’s underworld. The novels A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson feature protagonists from differing backgrounds who embark on treacherous journeys through the criminal underworld.
Television dramas will often interweave stereotypes into the series as audiences will already have an idea of what to expect. This is done so audiences will be able to quickly recognise characters or ideas without the writer’s explanations. Nic Pizzolatto’s 2014 southern gothic crime drama, True Detective, is about two detectives, Rustin ‘Rust’ Cohle and Martin ‘Marty’ Hart, who are being questioned in 2012 about a bizarre murder case in 1995. These characters are constructed to challenge the pre-existing stereotypes of conventional heroes in society and film. Pizzolatto uses filmic codes and conventions, as well as narrative conventions to construct and challenge these stereotypes.