The Flitcraft Parable

I've been rereading The Maltese Falcon lately, with an eye toward using it as inspiration on the next Horatio Wilkes mystery, which is currently in production here at Gratz Industries. The Maltese Falcon is by Dashiell Hammett, not, like my previous inspirations, by Raymond Chandler, but I think I can be forgiven the transgression, as even Chandler considered Falcon to be high art. Reading it for perhaps the third time, I'm blown away all over again.

The prose is sparse and electric, and Sam Spade is an enigmatic and enthralling protagonist--a man who won't rest until the murder of his partner Miles Archer is solved and avenged, but who perhaps never really liked his partner, and had no problem having an affair with Archer's wife when his partner was alive. The action is fantastic too. The Maltese Falcon kind of magically falls into Spade's hands about 3/4 of the way through the book, but otherwise the plotting is tight and realistic, and somebody's always drawing a gun or getting beat up or ransacking an apartment.

But one of the most intriguing things I ran into again was what has come to be known as "The Flitcraft Parable." Sam Spade is a man of few extra words--he says what he needs to when he needs to, and he doesn't go in much for stories or poetic thoughts (unlike Philip Marlowe)--but he does take the time about sixty pages into the story to sit down and tell Brigid O'Shaughnessy the story of Charles Flitcraft.

I won't quote the whole thing here--it's about 1200 words--but you can read the entirety of it online here. In short, the story Spade tells is about a successful, well-adjusted family man from Tacoma named Flitcraft who is walking along one day when a heavy steel beam from a construction site hits the concrete just a foot or so from his face. Flitcraft is so rattled by his near-death experience that he never comes home from lunch that day. He leaves his wife, his two boys, his successful real estate practice, his four o'clock tee time, and just disappears.

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

Five years later, someone matching Flitcraft's description is seen in Spokane, and Spade, who was then working for a Seattle detective agency, is sent to investigate. It's the same man all right. He's living under a new last name, but, oddly, his life is very similar to the one he left behind. He's married, has a baby boy, and makes a good living as an auto dealer. Spade has no instructions, so he meets the man and tells him plainly why he's come. Over lunch, Flitcraft explains--for the first time ever--why he left. The day the beam fell, he was scared, of course, but not so much frightened as shocked. "He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works," Spade tells Brigid.

Rather than be upset at the injustice of a cruel and indifferent world, "what disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not in step, with life. He said he knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life." The realization was profound: "Life could be ended for him at random by a falling beam: he would change his life at random by simply going away."

After wandering around for a few years though, Flitcraft fell into the same routines and patterns of his previous life--perhaps without even realizing it. "That's the part of it I always liked," Spade tells Brigid. "He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling."

The placement of this mysterious "parable" in the otherwise rapid-fire, no-nonsense patter of The Maltese Falcon is noticeably out of place--and for that reason you won't see it in the exceptional movie adaptation. Even Brigid O'Shaughnessy is caught off guard by the story and by Spade's sudden openness. It's so different from everything else, it practically screams, "this is the theme of the story!" Which begs the question: just what does the story mean?

Some people read it as Spade telling Brigid that no matter what crazy things people may do in the moment, they will always, eventually revert to form. Sam tells this story to Brigid specifically, and though Brigid is pretending to be innocent, Spade knows she is an inveterate liar. Is he just telling her, in a veiled way, that he knows she's a liar and that eventually she will betray him?

Others have read a more existential theme to this parable. Says one professor, "The Flitcraft parable might best be thought of as Spade's understanding of the existential universe--a world without rules. Flitcraft had fashioned his life by a set of societal expectations, and the 'beams
falling' temporarily convinced him that he'd been walking blindfolded all his life, not realizing the random nature of chance. He thinks, by leaving his wife, home, and career behind that he's behaving in a hard-boiled way, which he is until his nature channels him back into the same life he'd always lived. He 'got used to them not falling,' as Spade says."

That's a bit heady for me. I like the former interpretation--that like Columbo, Spade sees human life as a collection of routines. But where Columbo is always looking for the things criminals do outside of their routine that trip them up, Spade seems to be focused on people's "foolish consistencies" as evidence of who they really are.

The real trick of it is, Sam Spade never explains what the parable means, so if this is a theme of The Maltese Falcon it's difficult to understand what that theme is supposed to be. He tells us what part he likes, so we can look for meaning there, but ultimately, like a Rorschach test, perhaps the meaning is in the eye of the beholder. Do you disapprove of the man for abandoning his first family the way he did, or like Sam do you understand him completely? Is it a story telling us to break the rules, or does it argue we can never escape them? Does the world not care one way or the other? Or is it telling us in far more words what Buckaroo Bonzai said so much more succinctly: "Wherever you go, there you are."

Give the "Flitcraft Parable" (or better yet, the whole book!) a read and let me know what you think.