Joe Gores

Joe Gores is the author of Spade & Archer: The Prequel to Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon.

From a Q & A at the publisher's website:

Q: Apart from the fact that you're a Dashiell Hammett expert, what was the chief inspiration to write a prequel to his classic novel, The Maltese Falcon?

A: It was a comment the Hammett scholar Rick Layman once said about The Maltese Falcon that first grabbed me: that it was "America's first existential novel." I thought yes, that's exactly right: you don't know anything about the past of these people: they just appear full-blown as if they sprang from the head of Zeus. So I became fascinated by that idea: who is Spade, where did he come from, why he can essentially say to the fat man, "If you'd stayed away from me you would have been okay, but when you cross me then you have to deal with me now, because this is my town."

The way it came about is that that I'd met Professor Layman who'd written a number of fabulous books on Hammett, and the first really good biography of Hammett, called Shadow Man, (because one of the operatives at Pinkerton's detective agency where Hammett worked said that he was a great shadow man, he could follow anyone anywhere and no one would ever see this lanky man
tailing them). Through Rick Layman, I met the family, including Jo Marshall, Hammett's surviving daughter, and in 1999 I wrote her a letter asking if she thought a prequel to The Maltese Falcon would be a good idea. She said no. So my agent, Henry Morrison, told me just to forget about it.

Then in about 2004 the Hammett family was in San Francisco for a literary event and Jo Marshall got me in a corner and asked me if I'd like to write a sequel to The Maltese Falcon and I said no, I'd like to write a prequel, and she said "Oh, I guess I just wanted to see all of those wonderful characters again." And I said "but they're all dead." She said "oh, that's right!" So from there we began.

For my own part, I wanted to find out for myself who Sam Spade was when he started out—how did he become this iconic figure? Every private eye who I've known, including myself, thinks Sam Spade is the ideal detective. Hammett himself said "he's who all private detectives would like to be and in their more egotistical moments, think they are." I have always thought you learn more of the private detective procedures in Hammett's "Op Stories," but Spade is the gold standard. I think of him as the Continental Ops' older brother—the guy who really knows how to do it.

Read the complete Q & A.

At The Rap Sheet, read Mark Coggins' account of Joe Gores' visit to the “M” Is for Mystery bookshop in San Mateo, California, to discuss and sign Spade & Archer.

--Marshal Zeringue