Financial History Issue 129 (Spring 2019) | Page 12

EDUCATORS’ PERSPECTIVE Avoiding the Maltese Falcon (Part 2): The Flitcraft Parable Names are important in The Maltese Falcon. 1 This is evident from the very beginning of the novel, when Dashiell Hammett introduces us to detective Sam Spade. “Spade” is an appropriate name for someone who makes a living digging up clues; “Sam” or Samuel was Hammett’s first name. Hammett biographer Nathan Ward is convinced that Hammett put a great deal of himself into Sam Spade. He “…gave him the rooms he was living in and the streets he knew so well; added a handsome, angular face very much like his own…” In the first paragraph of the novel, Hammett writes, “He [Spade] looked rather pleas- antly like a blond satan.” 2 Perhaps Ham- mett is hinting here that there is a bit of the devil in himself, as well as in Spade. When Miss Wonderly (aka Brigid O’Shaughnessy) shows up at the offices of Spade and Archer, Spade’s secretary, Effie Perine, exclaims, “You’ll want to see her anyway: she’s a knockout.” This is another not-so-subtle hint to the reader to pay attention to names. Hammett paints an unflattering picture of the aptly named criminal mastermind Kasper Gutman, who represents corrupt, corpulent capitalists: The fat man was flabbily fat with bul- bous pink cheeks and lips and chins and neck, with a great soft egg of a belly that was all his torso, and pen- dant cones for arms and legs. As he advanced to meet Spade all his bulbs rose and shook and fell separately with each step, in the manner of clustered soap-bubbles not yet released from the pipe through which they had been blown. His eyes, made small by fat puffs around them, were dark and sleek. Dark ringlets thinly covered his broad scalp. He wore a black cutaway coat, black vest, black satin Ascot tie holding a pinkish pearl, striped grey worsted trousers, and patent-leather shoes. Hammett’s Gutman brings to mind the caricatures of capitalists and monopolists produced by Gilded Age cartoonists, such By Brian Grinder and Dan Cooper Scene from the 1941 film, “The Maltese Falcon,” with (L to R) Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, Sydney Greenstreet as Kasper Gutman, Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo and Mary Astor as Brigid O’Shaughnessy. as Joseph Keppler, whose “The Bosses of the Senate” appeared in Puck in 1889. Two more names, Flitcraft and Pierce, appear in what has become known as the Flitcraft Parable. According to Harvard professor Mihir Desai in his 2017 book, The Wisdom of Finance, “Like in any good detective story, Dashiell Hammett’s key clues to the parable are hiding in plain sight. By choosing the names Flitcraft and Charles Pierce, Hammett added layers of meaning and connected this story to finance.” Flitcraft was a well-known name among Pinkerton detectives because every Pinkerton office, according to Ward, had a copy of Allen J. Flitcraft’s Life Insur- ance Manual. The name Charles Pierce has been linked by numerous Hammett experts to Charles Sanders Peirce (pro- nounced purse), the founder of a school of philosophy known as pragmatism. Peirce realized that chance and randomness are ubiquitous in our world, but the risks brought about by such randomness can often be managed with insurance. Thus, risk and risk management are key to 10    FINANCIAL HISTORY  |  Spring 2019  | www.MoAF.org understanding the parable. With this in mind, consider the Flitcraft Parable. In the middle of the novel, the action comes to an unexpected halt as Spade tells O’Shaughnessy about an incident that hap- pened while he was working as a detective in Seattle. According to Spade, a man by the name of Flitcraft left his Tacoma real estate office to go to lunch one day and mysteri- ously disappeared. “He went like that,” Spade said, “like a fist when you open your hand.” Mrs. Flitcraft contacted Spade five years later after learning that someone had seen a man in Spokane who looked like her husband. Spade went to Spokane and found Flitcraft, who had been living there for a couple of years under the name of Charles Pierce. He owned an automobile business, and he had remarried and started a new family. Spade met Flitcraft/Pierce in his room at the Davenport Hotel in downtown Spokane, where Flitcraft told him his story. As he was walking to lunch in Tacoma, he passed an office building that was under construction when, “A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down