On 5 January 2004, Frederick Zackel wrote:
: I remember, for instance, Hammett's introduction / preface
to the Falcon
: popped up.
That's this, his introduction to the 1934 edition:
---------- INTRODUCTION
If this book had been written with the help of an outline or
notes or even a clearly defined plot-idea in my head I might
now be able to say how it came to be written and why it took
the shape it did, but all I can remember about its invention
is that somewhere I had read of the peculiar rental agreement
between Charles V and the Order of the Hospital of St. John
of Jerusalem, that in a short story called THE WHOSIS KID I
had failed to make the most of a situation I liked, that in
another called THE GUTTING OF COUFFIGNAL I had been equally
unfortunate with an equally promising denouement, and that I
thought I might have better luck with these two failures if I
combined them with the Maltese lease in a longer story.
I can remember more clearly where I got most of my
characters.
Wilmer, the boy gun-man, was picked up in Stockton,
California, where I had gone hunting a window-smasher who had
robbed a San Jose jewelry store. Wilmer's original was not my
window-smasher, unfortunately, but he was a fair pick-up. He
was a neat small smooth-faced quiet boy of perhaps
twenty-one. He said he was only seventeen, but that was
probably an attempt to draw a reform school instead of a
penitentiary sentence. He also said his father was a
lieutenant of police in New York, which may or may not have
been true, and he was serenely proud of the name the local
newspapers gave him---The Midget Bandit. He had robbed a
Stockton filling station the previous week. In Los Angeles a
day or two later, reading a Stockton newspaper---there must
be criminals who subscribe to clipping services---he had been
annoyed by the description the filling-station proprietor had
given of him and by the proprietor's statement of what he
would do to that little runt if he ever laid eyes on him
again. So The Midget Bandit had stolen an automobile and
returned to Stockton to, in his words, stick that guy up
again and see what he wanted to do about it.
Brigid O'Shaugnessy had two originals, one an artist, the
other a woman who came to Pinkerton's San Francisco office to
hire an operative to discharge her housekeeper, but neither
of these women was a criminal.
Dundy's prototype I worked with in a North Carolina railroad
yard; Cairo's I picked up on a forgery charge in Pasco,
Washington, in 1920; Polhaus's was a former captain of
detectives; I used to buy books from Iva's in Spokane;
Effie's once asked me to go into the narcotic smuggling
business with her in San Diego; Gutman's was
suspected---foolishly, as most people were---of being a
German secret agent in Washington, D. C., in the early days
of the war, and I never remember shadowing a man who bored me
as much.
Spade has no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he
is what most of the private detectives I worked with would
like to have been and in their cockier moments thought they
approached. For your private detective does not---or did not
ten years ago when he was my colleague---want to be an
erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he
wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of
himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he
comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander
or client.
DASHIELL HAMMETT.
New York, January 24, 1934.
----------
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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