'Spade & Archer' by Joe Gores
BOOK REVIEW
The former PI/writer is a close student of Dashiell Hammett's writing. The attention to detail makes for rich reading in this prequel to 'The Maltese Falcon.'
Writing a contemporary follow-up to a classic novel is either an act of bravery or chutzpah -- or perhaps both. One must contend with vociferous readers who consider the classic so sacrosanct they deem any new work heretical. In the last few months alone, the news of impending sequels to A.A. Milne's beloved "Winnie-the-Pooh" children's books and Douglas Adams' science-fiction satire "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series provoked a firestorm of criticism summed up by the sentiment "why mess with a good thing?"
And yet when Knopf announced that Joe Gores would write a follow-up to Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon," a crime novel so hallowed that the National Endowment for the Arts named it a selection for the Big Read, more positive reactions ensued, for several possible reasons.
Gores planned a prequel, not a sequel, so queasy memories of Robert B. Parker's resuscitation of Raymond Chandler's unfinished final Philip Marlowe novel, "Poodle Springs," could fade away. Hammett's daughter Jo Marshall not only approved of the origin story but approached Gores with the idea (albeit after turning down his original request several years earlier).
Gores is far and away the best candidate to pull off such a risky endeavor. The former PI's Edgar-nominated debut novel, "A Time of Predators" (1969), displayed a ruthless, sharp voice reminiscent of Hammett, further honed over a sporadic series of novels (including "32 Cadillacs" and "Cons, Scams & Grifts") featuring the private operatives constituting DKA, or Daniel Kearny Associates. And then there is his masterful historical novel "Hammett" (1975), which imagines the ex-Pinkerton operative and pulp master putting aside rewrites on "Red Harvest" to investigate the murder of a fellow op in San Francisco the year before the crash of 1929 -- and before "The Maltese Falcon" was first published as a five-part serial.
Eighty years later, "Spade & Archer" comes within admirable distance of a utopian prequel that, paraphrasing one of the novel's villains, gets to take Sam Spade apart and see what makes him tick. We first meet him in Washington state in 1921 as "a man a few years shy of thirty . . . [with] a long bony jaw, a flexible mouth, a jutting chin . . . [and] broad, steeply sloping shoulders." By the end of the first chapter, we'll know that Spade was a competitive pistol shot and war hero who thinks "if you need to use a gun you're doing a lousy job as a detective." We'll meet the former Ida Nolan, the bookstore clerk who was Spade's sweetheart before the Great War, before changing her name to Iva and marrying the man who stuck around, Miles Archer. And the seeds will be sown for the complex relationship between the men and Spade's decision to quit his agency and go out on his own -- and to the Bay Area.
