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Summary
Summary
When Sam Spade gets drawn into the Maltese Falcon case, we know what to expect: straight talk, hard questions, no favors, and no way for anyone to get underneath the protective shell he wears like a second skin. We know that his late partner, Miles Archer, was a son of a bitch; that Spade is sleeping with Archer's wife, Iva; that his tomboyish secretary, Effie Perine, is the only innocent in his life. What we don't know is how Spade became who he is. Spade & Archer completes the picture. 1921: Spade sets up his own agency in San Francisco and clients quickly start coming through the door. The next seven years will see him dealing with booze runners, waterfront thugs, stowaways, banking swindlers, gold smugglers, bumbling cops, and the illegitimate daughter of Sun Yat-sen; with murder, other men's mistresses, and long-missing money. He'll bring in Archer as a partner, though it was Archer who stole his girl while he was fighting in World War I. He'll tangle with a villain who never loses his desire to make Spade pay big for ruining what should've been the perfect crime. And he'll fall in love, though it won't turn out for the best. It never does with dames . . . Spade & Archer is a gritty, pitch-perfect, hard-boiled novel, the work of a master mystery writer, destined to become a classic in its own right.
Author Notes
Joe Gores lives in Marin County, California.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Edgar-winner Gores has not only pulled off the Herculean task of writing a prequel to The Maltese Falcon but also created a rip-roaring yarn of his own that will please even the crustiest of Hammett devotees. In 1921, Samuel Spade leaves the Continental Detective Agency and opens up his own office. One of his first cases, which the local cops have bungled, involves the robbery of $125,00 worth of gold coins from the San Anselmo, a passenger ship. Gores cuts forward twice, to 1925 and 1928, along the way setting the iconic Spade off on various adventures throughout the Bay Area. The author, who does a brilliant job of bringing Prohibition-era San Francisco to life with street-level detail and a native's perspective, also captures Hammett's spare style and tone perfectly. The only thing missing is a real femme fatale, but Gores, himself a former PI, gives us a number of young beauties to keep Spade busy until Miss Wonderly finally appears at his door. 5-city author tour. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* A prequel to The Maltese Falcon sounds like a bad idea in so many ways, but not when it's three-time Edgar winner Gores author of the novel Hammett (1975), a former PI himself, and a master of the hard-boiled style at the helm. The idea is to show us what Sam Spade was up to before he got involved with a black bird and a dame named O'Shaughnessy. Gores not only creates a compelling backstory for Spade but also does it so completely in the Hammett style that we suspend disbelief in an instant. Yes, it's imitation, but it's utterly unlike listening to a fake Sinatra croon. Rather than marveling at how much Gores sounds like Hammett, we forget all about who's doing the talking and let the mood take over. From the clipped dialogue to the emphasis on the geography of San Francisco to the carefully detailed recounting of what a PI does, Gores nails it. He's equally on the mark with Hammett's characters: not only Spade, whose toughness and savvy are immediately recognizable from what we know of him, but also his secretary, Effie, who plays a larger role here, and his partner, Miles, who more than earns the son of a bitch label Sam gives him in Falcon. The novel's only weak point, plot, is also in keeping with Hammett's fondness for corkscrewy story lines. Here the story straddles what are really three novellas, united by a Moriarty-like bad guy who just won't go away. But this novel isn't about story; it's about getting another chance to walk the streets of San Francisco with the city's most memorable fictional character.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AS is customary when a publisher wants to be extra-helpful, the early review copies of "Spade & Archer: The Prequel to Dashiell Hammett's 'The Maltese Falcon'" include a "conversation" with the author, Joe Gores. The book, Gores tells his deferential interlocutor (identified only as "Q"), was chiefly inspired by the Hammett scholar Richard Layman's remark that "The Maltese Falcon," serialized in 1929-30, was "America's first existential novel": "I thought, yes, that's exactly right. You don't know anything about the past of these people; they just appear full-blown, as if they sprang from the head of Zeus." It makes you wonder, not only about the freshness of Gores's metaphorical invention, but also about his common sense: in the process of inventing back stories for Hammett's characters, isn't he de-existentializing the very imaginative vision that drew him to the project in the first place? True, Gores does a more convincing job for Hammett than some writers have done for themselves - surely no reader of Rex Stout, for instance, really believes that Nero Wolfe was ever a lithe mountain lad from Montenegro. It's plausible that Hammett's amoral yet moralistic detective Sam Spade might have fought in World War I, as Gores tells us he did, and that Dundy, Spade's blustering, ineffectual antagonist on the San Francisco police force, might once have been a strikebreaker. It's even plausible that Iva, the wife of Spade's worthless partner, Miles Archer, might have jilted Sam when he went off to war. But do we care? In "The Maltese Falcon" we already know these people perfectly well. They are, an existentialist might say, what they do - and, a writer might add, how they talk. Perhaps the most un-Hammettlike moment in Gores's book comes when Spade's lawyer, Sid Wise, tells him: "You're a very different man from that 27-year-old kid who shoved a crumpled-up newspaper into my hand in our old office building over Remedial Loans. Harder. Colder." "A lot has happened to both of us," Sam replies. "We grew up." But that's wrong. Sam Spade has always been hard, cold and grown up, or he wouldn't be Sam Spade. Still, if anyone had to write this book, Gores would be the guy. Hammett's surviving daughter must have thought so, since she picked him to do this first-ever spinoff. Like Hammett himself, a onetime Pinkerton man, Gores has worked as a private investigator; he's won three Edgar Awards; and his 16 previous novels include "Hammett," in which the father of modern detective fiction rises from his typewriter to hunt down a murderer. Gores doesn't call himself a Hammett scholar, but he's clearly an obsessive - and for a writer of the 21st century, this obsession isn't entirely wholesome. Hammett's most annoyingly antiquated tic is his felt obligation to give every character, even the walk-ons, a wearisomely full physical description, clothes and all, and Gores feels obliged to do the same. "The Marin County sheriff's deputy who met them at the dock was long and lank with an unexpected watermelon potbelly under a gaudy yellow-and-green checked woolen shirt. He wore a black wide-brimmed fedora and a heavy tan corduroy jacket and black denim jeans over muddy boots, one of which was partially unlaced." "She was perhaps 22, tall and full-bosomed for a Chinese woman, Western in bearing. Her hair, of indeterminate length, was jet-black, worked into a large bun at the back of her head. She wore an untrimmed felt hat, a tan tailored frock with a contrasting pongee collar and a matching silk ribbon tie. Her shoes were the latest flat-heeled style." Some of these details may be telling, but which? More knowing writers leave readers room to visualize on their own, and keep the clutter down to the necessary, strategically selected minimum. When it comes to Spade himself, Gores is stuck with Hammett's own impossible-to-visualize description: "The steep rounded slope of his shoulders made his body seem almost conical - no broader than it was thick - and kept his freshly pressed gray coat from fitting very well. . . . The smooth thickness of his arms, legs and body, the sag of his big rounded shoulders, made his body like a bear's." Gores renders this baffling image more economical - "His powerful, conical, almost bearlike body kept his gray woolen suit coat from fitting well" - though it's hard to see how "woolen" helps any, except to suggest that it gets chilly in San Francisco. And of course Gores has to work in the familiar locutions: "That's no way to act, Sam." "He clinked his glass to hers. 'Success to crime.'" "Sid says his client is getting up on his hind legs." In "The Maltese Falcon," these were fresh and striking; in "Spade & Archer," they stick out as if they were in italics. They call for applause on recognition, like the opening notes of a favorite song. Anyone who undertakes to impersonate a beloved and highly mannered writer has such problems. When Robert Goldsborough channels Rex Stout, his Nero Wolfe naturally has to say "pfui" and "satisfactory." And at least Gores doesn't attempt any radical innovations, as Mark Winegardner did in continuing the "Godfather" saga, when he made Fredo Corleone a closeted homosexual. Nevertheless, Gores is pushing it when he has Sam Spade allude to George Sand, and it's hard to believe that in 1925 Spade would be reading "The Great Gatsby" - which had just been published - or whistling Louis Armstrong's newly recorded "Gut Bucket Blues." How does a working detective (who, as far as we know, doesn't own a radio or a phonograph) find time to keep up? These details display Spade's character less than they do Gores's research, of which he's distractingly proud. No locale goes untriangulated ("Ralph Toomey's ornate corner office at Matson Shipping looked kitty-corner across the 200 block of Market to the old Hansford Building"), no meal goes unpriced ("Dinner was 45 cents"), no topical allusion goes unexplained. "That sounds straight enough," Spade says at one point. "The Chinese Exclusion Act bars all Chinese except teachers and students and diplomats and the clergy from entering the country from China." As this speech suggests, Gores hasn't mastered the art of smooth exposition. His characters are always being told things they already know. ("You were assigned to the Seventh Battalion of the Second Infantry Brigade," Spade's old boss announces to him, "and saw action in the trenches of the Lens-Arras sector of France. You were wounded. You got a medal.") And they often sound as if they're reading from a guidebook. ("The founding members were journalists and artists and musicians and writers," a member of the Bohemian Club tells Spade, "who lamented the lack of culture in post-gold-rush San Francisco.") Some of this ham-handedness just comes with the genre: Stout's Archie Goodwin, like Conan Doyle's Dr. Watson before him, reads newspaper reports aloud to get his boss, and the reader, up to speed on the crime in question. Some of it, though, is due to Gores's own clumsiness. Almost 80 pages after Spade delivers his speech about immigration restrictions, another character echoes it nearly word for word. When Hammert, in the original "Maltese Falcon," had to let us in on the long history of his bejeweled golden bird, he put it in the mouth of Casper Gutman, the "fat man," and made the five-page dose of exposition go down as easily as possible by contriving a distinctive voice. "Well, sir, what do you think of that? . . . These are facts, historical facts, not schoolbook history, not Mr. Wells's history, but history nevertheless." Such a voice and such a character - whose ponderous bonhomie and autodidactic grandiloquence simultaneously mask and reveal his ultimate coldness - are far out of reach for Gores. He's smart to keep his criminal mastermind offstage for 276 pages: this mysterious figure turns out to be "a slender, slightly stooped whipcord man" whose idea of a menacing line is "We meet again, Spade." Hammett's fat man has no personal history to explain away his archetypal grandeur; Gores sedulously equips his archvillain with a back story, which diminishes him to a small-time grifter who's gotten above his raising: "My old man was a tent-show minister in the Midwest. . . . The sanctimonious bastard." Gores does manage to out-Hammett Hammett in one respect: his MacGuffin plot is even more elaborate, and even less memorable. "Spade & Archer" has three separate episodes, set in 1921, 1925 and 1928. We get a gold heist, a bank fraud, a scheme to blame union members for a series of thefts, and machinations involving money that once belonged to the Chinese political leader Sun Yat-sen. If your attention wanders as the characters sit around explaining the various twists and turns, you won't have missed much; but hang around long enough and you'll get to see the corpse of a woman who's been murdered and "violated." Why does the killer, who, whatever his faults, never shows a sign of sexual pathology, also rape his victim? It can only be his sheer noir-ness. The bigger mystery is why the man behind all these malefactions seems so easily discouraged the first time he tries to kill Spade (seven or eight years seems like a long time to permit your nemesis to go around thwarting you), but if he'd gotten down to business, "Spade & Archer" wouldn't outbulk "The Maltese Falcon" by a hundred or so pages, and there'd be far fewer characters to describe and clothe. I have to admit, though, Gores got a nostalgic smile out of me twice. Once was when Sam Spade adopts the alias Nick Charles, the protagonist of Hammett's novel "The Thin Man" (a much better-written novel than "The Maltese Falcon," by the way). The other was at the end, when Gores reprises - well, I'd better not say, but I wasn't smiling just because the book was over at last. David Gates's most recent book is "The Wonders of the Invisible Worid," a collection of stories.
Kirkus Review
Veteran Gores (Glass Tiger, 2006, etc.) spins the straw of an origin story for the firm of Spade Archer, violently dissolved in the opening chapters of The Maltese Falcon, into storytelling gold. When he leaves the Continental Detective Agency to hang his own shingle with Effie Perine as his secretary, Sam Spade already knows Miles Archer, who married Spade's old flame, Iva Nolan, when Spade volunteered for war service. Looking for runaway banking heir Henny Barber, Spade bumps into a much bigger case: the theft of $375,000 in gold from the San Anselmo, Henny's probable ride to the South Seas. Spade feeds information to Sgt. Dundy and Patrolman Tom Polhaus, then watches as they let the master criminal behind the theft slip through their fingers. He resurfaces in 1925, when insurance man Ray Kentzler secretly hires Spade to establish whether banker Collin Eberhard's mysterious non-drowning was accident, suicide or murder, and Effie's friend Penny Chiotras, in an apparently unrelated development, seeks the fabled chest of Bergina. The search for the mastermind won't close till 1928, when Mai-lin Choi's search for the money stolen from her unacknowledged (and very well-known) father and Archer's first case as Spade's partner culminate in one last treasure hunt. Along with the obligatory pleasures of watching Spade dealing with familiar supporting characters for the first time, Gores, a far more virtuoso plotter than Hammett, keeps multiple pots boiling furiously while providing a pitch-perfect replica of his master's voice. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Here, in what is clearly a labor of love, Dashiell Hammett expert and veteran Edgar Award-winning novelist Gores breathes new life into the PI firm of Spade & Archer, some 79 years after its initial appearance. This prequel to The Maltese Falcon recounts such incidents as the first meeting between Sam Spade and his secretary, Effie Perine, and the sordid history of Iva Archer. Even then a Spade is still a Spade, and Archer is a dumb SOB. Covering a period of seven years, Gores successfully weaves together plot strands that include everything from Treasure Island and Sun Yat-sen to union busting. Through it all, Sam manages to glide gracefully from shipboard to boardroom to speakeasy in a wonderful evocation of a lovingly detailed lost San Francisco peopled by the ghosts of Hammett, Humphrey Bogart, and folks who smoke as if their lives depend on it. This homage should both please fans of the original (it has the blessing of the Hammett estate) and alert new readers to what they've been missing. As such, it is highly recommended for all public libraries.-Bob Lunn, Kansas City P.L., MO (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Spade's Last Case It was thirteen minutes short of midnight. Drizzle glinted through the wind-danced lights on the edge of the Tacoma Municipal Dock. A man a few years shy of thirty stood in a narrow aisle between two tall stacks of crated cargo, almost invisible in a black hooded rain slicker. He had a long bony jaw, a flexible mouth, a jutting chin. His nose was hooked. He was six feet tall, with broad, steeply sloping shoulders. He stayed in the shadows while the scant dozen passengers disembarked from the wooden-hulled steam-powered passenger ferry Virginia V , just in from Seattle via the Colvos Passage. His cigarette was cupped in one palm as if to shield it from the rain, or perhaps to conceal its glowing ember from watching eyes. The watcher stiffened when the last person off the Virginia V was a solid, broad-shouldered man in his late thirties, dressed in a brown woolen suit. His red heavy-jawed face was made for joviality, but his small brown eyes were wary, constantly moving. The passenger went quickly along the dock toward a narrow passageway that led to the city street beyond. The watcher, well behind, ambled after him. The first man had started through the passageway when he was jumped by two bulky, shadowy figures. There were grunts of effort, curses, the sound of blows, the scrape of leather soles on wet cobbles as the men struggled. The watcher announced his arrival by jamming his lighted cigarette into the eye of one attacker. The man screamed, stumbled unevenly away holding a hand over his eye. The second attacker broke free and fled. "'Lo, Miles." Miles Archer, holding a handkerchief to his bloodied nose, said thickly through the bunched-up cloth, "Uh... thanks, Sam." "Wobblies?" asked Sam Spade. "Wobblies. Who else?" They went down the passageway toward the street. Archer was limping. He had the thick neck and slightly soft middle of an athletic man going to seed. "They finally made you as undercover for Burns?" "Took 'em long enough," Archer bragged. He looked over at Spade. "Back with Continental, huh? Uh...?how'd you find me?" "Wasn't looking. Was staked out for a redheaded paper hanger out of Victoria." "I saw him miss the ferry in Seattle." Spade nodded, put a smile on his face that did not touch his eyes. "Belated congratulations on your marriage, Miles." "Yeah, uh, thanks, Sam." Something sly and delighted seemed suddenly to dance in Archer's heavy, coarse voice. "We're living over in Spokane so's she can keep working at Graham's Bookstore, even though I'm down here most of the time. Tough on the little lady, but what can she do?" Spade was at a table set for afternoon tea when the fortyish matron entered from Spokane's Sprague Avenue. The Davenport Hotel's vast Spanish-patio-style lobby was elegant, with a mezzanine above and, on the ground floor, an always-burning wood fireplace. When the woman paused in the doorway he stood. His powerful, conical, almost bearlike body kept his gray woolen suit coat from fitting well. She crossed to him. She had wide-set judging eyes and a small, disapproving mouth. "I am Mrs. Hazel Cahill. And you are..." He gave a slight, almost elegant bow. "Samuel Spade." Mrs. Cahill set her Spanish-leather handbag on one of the chairs, stripped off her kidskin gloves, and slid them through the bag's carrying straps. Her movements were measured. She turned slightly so Spade's thick-fingered hands could remove her coat. She sat. She did not thank him. She said, "Three o'clock last Monday afternoon he and two other men came from this hotel, laughing about their golf scores. My husband, Theodore, and I just moved here from Tacoma a month ago, and it's been five years, Excerpted from Spade and Archer: The Prequel to Dashiell Hammett's the Maltese Falcon by Joe Gores All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.