New to the thriller genre, Colin Murray's recently published debut After a Dead Dog was very well received. Here he writes about what drew him to the genre in the first place and what he feels are the most important books in its history.
For me, it all started with the black statuette of a bird. It was only about a foot tall and rather unprepossessing, but it was love at first sight...
I’d had mild infatuations before - Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, the great Gallic ratiocinator of The Purloined Letter, was more than exotic enough to appeal to a twelve-year-old schoolboy from the East End of London - and, almost inevitably, an adolescent crush on the one-time resident of 221B Baker Street. And, fond though my memories are of these two great detectives (and it’s worth remembering that C. Auguste Dupin solved his first case, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, a few years before the word ‘detective’ appeared in the English language), it was Sam Spade, and The Maltese Falcon, who really won my heart.
There was something liberating and refreshing about the ‘blond Satan’. Somerset Maugham may have described him as ‘an unscrupulous rogue and heartless crook’ but that has always seemed to me to be wide of the mark. Certainly, Sam Spade is not a wholly admirable hero (but then Sherlock Holmes is hardly without flaws) but he is, finally, a good and moral man, and a remarkably resourceful, self-confident and uncompromising one. He isn’t motivated by money and he can’t be sidetracked by sex, the forces of law and order don’t intimidate him and he will do what he thinks is right even if that threatens his life. He is free of the baggage that most of us carry, a practical existentialist who can make a difference and knows how to do it.
And then there’s the intriguing tale and the vividly described characters he encounters as he tracks down the killer of his partner, Archer: the beautiful, protean Brigid O’Shaughnessy, a pathological liar who changes her story more often than she changes her underwear; the narcissistic Joel Cairo; Wilmer, the gun-obsessed kid; and, above all, the aptly named Gutman. All of them contrast with the seemingly incorruptible Spade and highlight some aspect of his personality.
Famously, Dashiell Hammett worked for the Pinkerton Agency for a while and, therefore, knew about private detectives and the way they worked. However, I rather doubt that any of them, including the highly moral and completely uncompromising Hammett, ever behaved like Sam Spade. But, then, Hammett wasn’t entirely reflecting life, he was creating one of the great detectives, an archetype, the full-blown, hard-boiled private eye. And he used the leanest of lean prose to do it.
He also used a plot device that I hadn’t come across before. The Maltese Falcon itself is what Alfred Hitchcock called a ‘McGuffin’, a thing, apparently of value, that everyone wants but is really only there to get all the characters in place and the action started. Subsequently, I realized that Wilkie Collins used the same device long before in The Moonstone but The Maltese Falcon introduced it to me and I loved it.
The Maltese Falcon was, alas, Sam Spade’s only outing and so, as a sixteen-year-old haunting the library in Leyton High Road, desperate for more, with only a stern but helpful librarian to turn to, I was bereft.
Affairs with Simenon, Sayers and even Chandler were good and rewarding but they didn’t quite satisfy a certain yearning. (Chandler and Marlowe came close but, stylish and powerful though the books are, the plots somehow lack the clean lines of Hammett’s.)
Then, eventually, I found the Continental Op and I fell in love all over again. Overweight, squat and bald, the Continental Op has no family, no personal history, no real home, and, apparently, no life other than investigating crime. In fact, Hammett stripped him back so far he doesn’t even have a name. And yet he is the apotheosis of the private eye. Unsentimental, clear-eyed and as sharp and hard-boiled as they come, he first appeared in the stories that Hammett wrote for Black Mask in the 1920s and then, memorably, in the ground-breaking novels, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse.
When the Continental Op investigates, he is compelled by a moral righteousness and a sense of duty that amounts to an obsession and when he decides to clean up a town, as he does in Red Harvest when his client is murdered, then that town is comprehensively purged. There’s something of the ferocious Old Testament prophets about the Op.
It is now nudging on towards fifty years since Dashiell Hammett died and more than seventy since his last novel (The Thin Man was published in 1934) but he still casts a long shadow. His prose was clean and precise, his characters vivid and memorable, his plots sharp and controlled and he gave the world Sam Spade and the Continental Op.
Dorothy Parker said of him, ‘He is so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn. And it is also true that he is a good, hell-bent, cold-hearted writer, with a clear eye for the ways of hard women and a fine ear for the words of hard men.’ And Raymond Chandler’s view was that ‘Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley…[he] gave murder back to the people who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse…he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all.’
There are a number of great American crime writers, Chandler himself and, more recently, James Lee Burke spring immediately to mind, but Hammett was one of the first and remains the best.
There’s something of that sixteen-year-old Londoner I once was still remaining inside me and he still remembers that first meeting with Sam Spade and the thrill that it sent through him. And even now, many years and many re-readings later, there’s still a shudder of anticipation when I pick up The Maltese Falcon and read that opening description of Sam and realize that I’m about to be entranced again by the best American detective novel ever written.
by Colin Murray, author of After a Dead Dog, ISBN 978 1 84529 548 6
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