GREAT ART, BAD ARTIST:

Sam Spade at 75: "The Maltese Falcon" celebrates its diamond anniversary. (TOM NOLAN, February 10, 2005, Opinion Journal)

The Pulitzer Prize for the best novel published in America in 1930 went to a book by Margaret Ayer Barnes titled "Years of Grace." But it was quite a different 1930 novel that would enter American cultural folklore and remain in print into the 21st century.

Feb. 14 marks the 75th anniversary of the publication of Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon": that riveting tale involving a San Francisco private detective named Samuel Spade and a diverse crew of miscreants, all in search of a coveted 16th-century statuette. The anniversary will be commemorated, this month and next, by lectures, exhibits, and celebrations at the Library of Congress in Washington (near Hammett's Maryland birthplace, and his Arlington National Cemetery grave), and in San Francisco, where the story was written. And the novel is available from Vintage/Black Lizard in a newly packaged trade-paperback edition (as are two other Hammett books, and a new anthology, "Vintage Hammett"). [...]

Hailed on publication by such influential reviewers as Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woolcott, "The Maltese Falcon" in time earned praise from such European novelists as André Malraux and André Gide. Hammett's prose was compared favorably to Hemingway's, and it was reported in the press, circa 1930, that Dashiell Hammett was a contender for the Nobel Prize. "The Maltese Falcon" has been published in 76 foreign editions in 30 countries. In 1998, the board of the Modern Library named it one of the best hundred novels written in English in the 20th century.

"It is an American classic without qualification," says Prof. Layman, who will give the Library of Congress talk on "The Maltese Falcon" on Feb. 15. "The novel is 'a ripping good yarn,' on the one hand; on the other hand, it's a book that can be held to the highest literary standards and acquit itself well."

And the most fascinating aspect of the book is that it presents an eloquent argument against Hammett's own later decision to play the sap for Stalin, the Communist Party, and his despicable lover, Lillian Hellman.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 2, 2005 7:52 AM