This week, or at the latest next, I will likely complete Prey for the Maltese Falcon, my follow-up to Return of the Maltese Falcon. It takes place in 1939 and posits what Sam Spade might have been up to around ten years later.

It’s an honor, and frankly a relief, to have had Return so warmly received. My wife Barb warned me I was really sticking my neck out this time – who was I to be writing a sequel to what many (including me) consider the best the best tough mystery novel ever written – the book that can be viewed as the paradigm for the entire sub-genre of the private eye novel?

I tried to answer that by respecting Dashiell Hammett and his creation, and honoring him with something more than just a pastiche. Readers coming to the book will always have to judge that for themselves.

A perhaps more interesting question is: why had I been thinking about doing a sequel to The Maltese Falcon for something like twenty years? When the novel was decades away from going into the public domain, making any such effort even possible? Prior to the novel gaining public domain status, I thought it highly unlikely the Hammett estate would come to me for the job.

Sam Spade got on my little-kid radar by way of advertisements in comic-strip form that appeared in Sunday newspapers and occasionally comic books. My discovering those strips was in the mid-1950s and even then those ads/comics were old news – literally, old newspapers and comic books that had somehow gotten into my grubby little hands (and psyche).

It was common for advertisements in the Sunday funnies to disguise themselves as just another comic strip, or a page of comics in a comic. Sometimes such strips invented their own recurring characters, the better to fool readers into thinking they weren’t reading an ad at all (particularly kids). Sometimes advertisers went so far as to license existing comics characters to hawk their goods – famously, Al Capp’s Li’l Abner (for Cream of Wheat) and Fearless Fosdick (for Wildroot Cream-Oil) appeared in mini-comics in the pages of slick magazines like Look and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as comic books and Sunday comics sections.

Like Fosdick, Sam Spade appeared on behalf of Wild Root Cream-Oil (a hair tonic) in a strip called The Adventures of Sam Spade, tying in with a popular radio show of that name starring Howard Duff. The strip took up a lot of real estate in the funnies – a half- or even full-page – and each was a short mystery, solved usually in a way that (you’re ahead of me) had to do with Wild Root Cream-Oil.

They were lively strips, many of them beautifully drawn by Golden Age comics great, Lou Fine, a Will Eisner crony. Over a three-year period, at least 25 strips were published. This link will take you to some nice examples.

Because of these strips, I knew about the Sam Spade radio show, but missed out on those, because The Adventures of Sam Spade aired before my time, from 1946 to 1951 (on NBC). The series was enormously popular and made a star out of Howard Duff, who graduated to movies (and later TV) but never was as big a star as he’d been in radio. Another popular radio series, Suspense, did two episodes with Duff as Spade, one of which (“The Kandy Tooth Caper”) was a 60-minute sequel to The Maltese Falcon.

The series was a spoofy take on the genre not at all in keeping with Hammett’s original approach, but its success having almost as much to do with establishing Sam Spade as the iconic private eye character (maybe the ironic private eye character) as Bogart’s Spade had with the John Huston classic film.

The series might have lasted longer, and perhaps made the transition to TV, but the anti-Communist witch-hunt led to creator Dashiell Hammett, known for his association with left-wing causes, becoming a ripe target for Senator Joe McCarthy. Hammett, who had served his country in two wars, even did hard time when he refused to name names in the HUAC hearings. McCarthy’s odious assistant Roy Cohn even tried to have Hammett’s five novels banned from U.S. Information Service (USIS) overseas libraries. Cohn failed when Hammett fan, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, intervened.

In the witch hunt’s wake, the radio show was re-tooled as Charlie Wild, Private Detective (1951), with a new detective taking Spade’s place, although secretary Effie Perine stayed on board; the radio series didn’t last long, although it did make a shaky transition to TV (1950-1952). Effie came along (the setting now New York) played by young Iowa gal Cloris Leachman (later picked up by Mike Hammer at the start of the film Kiss Me Deadly).

I’m not sure when it was that I first saw the Bogart/Huston Maltese Falcon. I vaguely remember faking a stomach ache so I could stay home from church and see it on the Sunday Morning Movie. I loved it, of course. The likes of the Saint and Sherlock Holmes, two of my previous obsessions, couldn’t hold a candle to Bogie’s Sam.

Finally I caught up with the original Sam Spade in the Permabooks 35-cent edition of The Maltese Falcon with a great cover by Harry Bennett (a very ‘60s rendition of Brigid, Wilmer and Caspar Gutman). And at some point I discovered a Dell paperback of A Man Called Spade, with the three Hammett-published Spade short stories.

In my teens I was inhaling all the Hammett I could find, usually in ill-lit old secondhand bookstores; same with Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane – the Big Three, as far as I was concerned (and still am).

Periodically I discovered other Spade oddities, like the 1946 David McKay “Feature Book” adaptation of The Maltese Falcon in comic-book form, with funky art by Rodlow Willard; and one or two of the record albums of the several Falcon radio adaptations starring Bogart and other original cast members.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I have never watched an episode of the AMC series, Monsieur Spade, not wanting to be influenced; and I have not revisited Spade & Archer by the late Joe Gores. I frankly recall not being taken with it, and thinking I’d like to have a crack at the character myself someday (though I am otherwise a Gores fan).

It’s clear that Hammett did something very special in The Maltese Falcon, and a lot of it was Sam Spade, who despite appearing in one novel remains for many of us the quintessential private eye. The imprint of the author and his character on me was such that I could become intrigued with them both just by reading a comic strip advertising hair oil tonic.

Guess what movie is considered one of the best Irish mob movies ever?

M.A.C.

Tags: Prey for the Maltese Falcon, Return of the Maltese Falcon, Road to Perdition, Sam Spade