Flitcraft

Stuff happens, and then it doesn't.

Most days, I wear a bracelet inscribed with the word “Flitcraft.” I like the opaqueness. People look confused and ask, “um, what’s a Flitcraft?” What indeed.

Warning: For non-Dashiell Hammett fans, expect a few minor spoilers.

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(New York Times obituary, January 11, 1961.)

Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) wrote five novels and dozens of short stories, almost all focused on the dark world of sleuths, cops, dames, and conmen. He knew that milieu well, having worked for the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency for seven years, with an intermission to serve in World War 1 and catch the Spanish flu and tuberculosis. (Despite ill health, he enlisted again for World War 2.) By the 20s he was writing for pulp magazines like Black Mask and The Smart Set. (“Pulp” magazines were so-called because of their low-quality wood-pulp paper. Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” had a working title of “Black Mask,” an homage to the original magazine.)

For twelve years, Hammett wrote amazing stories and then novels. His terse tough-guy prose has been compared to Hemmingway. By the early 30s, he’d become a roaring success, his books translated into popular movies. (The Thin Man became a whole series of movies, largely based on the chemistry between stars William Powell and Myrna Loy.) Fame turned Hammett into a celebrity but ended his writing. He wrote his last novel in 1934 and spent the rest of his life drinking, running out of money, and dying. He had a final coda as a target of the anti-Communist witch hunts of the 40s and 50s, serving 6 months in federal prison for refusing to name fellow leftists.

Hammet’s principled stance echoes his fictional protagonists’ sense of duty. Hammett’s detectives lived in a world where rules were penciled in and laws hypothetical. The cops were could be crooked and rich men held most of the cards but Hammett’s private eyes created a code and stuck by it. This is how he described his most used character, the never-named Continental Op:

I see in him a little man going forward day after day through mud and blood and death and deceit—as callous and brutal and cynical as necessary—towards a dim goal with nothing to push or pull him towards it except he’s been hired to reach it.

In one story, an attractive young woman tries to tempt the Op with money and then sex appeal. The Op is having none of it:

“You’re still all twisted up,” I said brusquely, standing now and adjusting my borrowed crutch. “You think I’m a man and you’re a woman. That’s wrong. I’m a manhunter and you’re something that has been running in front of me. There’s nothing human about it. You might just as well expect a hound to play tiddly-winks with the fox he’s caught.”

Hammett’s third novel, The Maltese Falcon (1930), was the first not to feature the Continental Op. Instead, Hammett gives us Sam Spade, the smooth operator who co-runs Spade and Archer Detectives. A woman named Ruth Wonderly (aka Brigid O’Shaughnessy) shows up begging for help, and Spade and Archer oblige, which sets off a hunt for a lost treasure and collision with a collection of unsavory crooks. The twisty turny plot was begging for a film adaptation and gets a brilliant one in 1941.

I’ve watched The Maltese Falcon maybe a dozen times. It’s the perfect film noir (although that label wasn’t coined until 1946). First-time director John Huston brilliantly captures the feel of Hammett’s prose. Huston’s direction is fantastic, but Humphrey Bogart makes the film sizzle. “Bogie” seems the only possible Sam Spade but there were two earlier Maltese Falcons—in 1931 and 1936.

The 1931 Falcon was directed by Roy Del Ruth and starred Bebe Daniels and Ricardo Cortez (born Jacob Krantz but his name was changed to make him sound more Latin in the spirit of Rudolph Valentino.) This Falcon is fairly true to the book but it was made pre-Hayes code¹ and so is a lot sexier than the later films. Watch this opening scene where an unknown client straightens her stockings after leaving Spade’s office.

Now see roughly the same scene in the 1941 version. Cortez’s Spade was a silky smiling ladies’ man from the start. Bogart’s Spade is sharper, more suspicious. And yes, far far better. I find it painful to watch Cortez in the role. It gives me an unpleasant uncanny valley feeling in my stomach.

Bogart was lucky to get the job. It was originally offered to a bigger star, George Raft, who turned it down. Later, Raft was asked about Bogart’s success in the surprise hit and said, “There, but for the grace of me, go I.” After the Maltese Falcon, Bogie’s career took off, with Casablanca (1942), To Have and Have Not (1944), and The Big Sleep (1946).

Huston’s film is faithful to the book, even more than Del Ruth’s. He captured Hammett’s jaded cynicism leavened with a belief in justice. Hammett’s worlds are dark but his protagonists are still driving towards the light. Huston, who also wrote the screenplay, barely changes Hammett’s wonderful prose, with one major exception:

In the book, Spade has been hired by the fascinating but dangerous Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor). About a third of the way through the story, they have to wait for another character (Joel Cairo, played by Peter Lorre in the film) to arrive. While they wait, Spade suddenly starts telling O’Shaughnessy the story of a man named Flitcraft. The story has absolutely nothing to do with the plot, and Huston was right to cut it, but it captures something important to Spade, and to Hammett.

Mary Astor and Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (1941).

Years earlier, Spade had been asked to find a well-off man called Flitcraft who had suddenly disappeared from his life in Tacoma, Washington, leaving behind a wife and two children.

“He went like that,” Spade said, “like a fist when you open your hand.”

Spade had no success. Some years later word came that someone had seen a man like Flitcraft in Spokane. Spade tracked the man down to discover it was indeed Flitcraft. Asked why he had vanished. Flitcraft was eager to explain.

"Here's what happened to him. Going to luch he passed an office-building that was being put up - just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn't touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. It only took a piece of skin off, but he still had the scar when I saw him. He rubbed it with his finger - well, affectionately - when he told me about it. He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works."

That moment shook Flitcraft’s world. He realized life made far less sense than he’d thought. He’d believed in order and sense but discovered that chunks of metal could randomly fall from the sky. To fit himself into the world as he now saw it, Flitcraft decided to abandon his previous life and create one based on the world as it really was, random, senseless.

“He went to Seattle that afternoon," Spade said, "and from there by boat to San Francisco. For a couple of years he wandered around and then drifted back to the Northwest, and settled in Spokane and got married. His second wife didn't look like the first, but they were more alike than they were different. You know, the kind of women that play fair games of golf and bridge and like new salad-recipes. He wasn't sorry for what he had done. It seemed reasonable enough to him. I don't think he even knew he had settled back naturally in the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling."

After Spade finished telling Flitcraft’s story, Brigid O'Shaughnessy insincerely says “How perfectly fascinating,” but she has no idea why Spade told her the tale, and the plot immediately moves elsewhere.²

If the story meant nothing to Brigid, it meant enough to Hammett to take a break in his tightly plotted novel just to tell it to us. The key is Spade saying, “the part of it I always liked.” Spade (and presumably Hammett) liked that Flitcraft had woken up to see life’s essential meaninglessness, and then fallen back asleep after he managed to settle into a new routine.

There’s more going on there—there are scads of theories about Flitcraft—but for me, the story captures the way in which most of us settle into routines until something happens to turn our lives upside down. In February 2020, who was thinking we were about to be hit by a virus that would have us huddled indoors, washing grocery deliveries, and trying to bake our own bread?

Did anyone think in June 1914 that the assassination of a Habsburg prince was going to lead to a European cataclysm and the collapse of four empires? Or on a more personal level, think of some poor woman coming home early to find her husband doing a different kind of housework with the maid. At any moment, any of our cozy worlds can be transformed into nightmares, and we’ll find ourselves desperately hunting for toilet paper or phoning highly recommended divorce lawyers.

This is good to remember. Your peaceful world can fall apart in a mad instant. I had my bracelet made four years ago, days after I discovered I was heading for a divorce. It was a reminder that earthquakes happen. A Flitcraftian moment lurks around every corner.

(Rest assured, mine is not a grim noir story. I was upset by my divorce but my ex is a decent human and we managed to break up without too much acrimony and are civil today.)

Zooming out from the personal, this is true for our broader landscapes. It’s good to be concerned about possible beams falling. We should be on the lookout for new viruses. Climate change needs our attention too. China invading Taiwan would be very bad. Russia invading Ukraine is very bad. For Ukrainians, beams are falling from the sky every day. Random violence has become their new normal.

Reminding yourself that disaster is possible is a good way to prevent or ameliorate it. This is why insurance companies make bank.

Still, we can take worry too far. Are we really facing a red state vs. blue state civil war? I doubt it. Remember the Ebola scare? That one went nowhere fast. Inflation? Bad but probably not going to match Germany in the 1920s. Depression? Unlikely. Armed robot dogs? Meh. Most of the time the dully complacent folks are correct to be unconcerned and better off not constantly worrying. Flitcraft abandoned one successful life and, after some upheaval, settled into another one. Most folks in America have gone back to eating at restaurants, hugging each other, and smiling in the open air. Anyway, if something does happen, it’ll probably be something completely different from what we expected.

I question the choices doomsday preppers make to be always stockpiling dried meat and 9mm ammo. Sure, they’ll be ready for World War Z but who needs to have that much stress 24/7?

So am I still on the lookout for disasters, or have I become another Flitcraft, settling back into the humdrum? Much more the latter. And I’m ok with that. It’s good to remember that life can send you spinning sideways, but it’s probably not healthy to live that way all the time.

But I’m still wearing my bracelet.

1. The Motion Picture Production Code, or Hayes Code, was organized by Will Hayes, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. It was created as a form of self-censorship by the film industry to avoid state-supported censorship. “Pre-code” films had gotten pretty hot and had led to the creation of state censorship boards. The code was created in 1930 and fully enforced by 1934. The 1931 Falcon came at the end of a looser era. Enforcement of the code faded by the late 1950s and was superseded by the modern film rating system in 1968.

2. The full Flitcraft story is here, “The Flitcraft Parable.”