>>Why Brigid was whistling "En Cuba"
>The author was probably doing a little foreshadowing
here. In the words of
>my sainted grandmother, repeated every time I tried to
whistle, "Whistling
>girls and cackling hens/Always come to some bad
end."
Over here, that's cast:
A whistling woman, a crowing hen
Is good for neither [gods?] nor men
[Don't recall if it's God or gods]
Readers of Thomas Hardy's _Tess of the d'Urbervilles_ will
recall that
both whistling women and crowing hen are motifs presaging ill
fortune
(Hardy's novels are a vast repository of folklore]. Hammett
may well
have had something similar in mind. However, as one of
the
characteristics of pulp writing is its 'nowness' (set in the
immediate
present), it may simply be the case that the tune is included
as a way
of 'fixing' the narrative in the present of 1929.
(I must admit, however, that I don't know the tune or its
chronology,
but I vaguely recall reading somewhere that it was 'topical'
or
'popular' at the time.)
ED
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