Books can create different worlds that take us to new places. But books can also recreate old worlds that remind us of what once was. The Maltese Falcon
Not only did it introduce me to the pure fun of mysteries, it opened my eyes to the seedier side of American culture before World War II. Like most of us born in the 1950’s, we believed that America consisted of only good people living by strong moral values. There were certainly bad men, but the line separating good from bad was clear and well defined. The 1960’s changed that, introducing a world of ambiguity into the conversation of moral behavior.
Even though Maltese was written in 1930, it captured that ambiguity. The good guys were not all good, at least not like the heroes of in the Westerns that I grew up watching. The bad guys were not pure evil, at least not the Nazis who were always the villains in post World War II America. There was ambiguity in Maltese. In fact, sometimes it wasn’t clear who was good and who was bad.
When I read Maltese in the early 1970’s, it captured my imagination. Here was a world that seemed vaguely familiar but utterly new. Here was a past in contrast to the all-American culture of a moral high ground. Yet despite this contrast, perhaps because of it, the culture captured in Maltese was still oddly comfortable.
Then again, perhaps I’m over thinking it. Maybe I was just caught up by the fantastic dialogue, the clever story, and the fascinating main character Sam Spade.
There was another tangible way this book impacted me: it made me fall in love with mysteries. I could not get enough of them. I read all the other Hammett books, all the Agatha Christie books, all the Chandler books, all the … well, you get the idea. I’m still a sucker for a hard boiled detective mystery. Especially if he has a sense of humor.
But in the end, the real impact this book had on me was to see people differently. While never comfortable with bad behavior, and still very much in love with the concept of simple heroes, I grew to understand that a bit of bad behavior exists in us all. It is something we all know in our hearts, I suppose. Each of us discovers it in his or her own way. For me, oddly, curiously, unexpectedly, it came from a book that had been written nearly 50 years previously and was merely meant to tell a good story.
And for that reason, The Maltese Falcon makes my list of 25 books that most influenced my life.
Want to read more of my top 25? Here is the list thus far:
Celebration of Discipline – #1
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings – #2
The Cost of Discipleship – #3
The Screwtape Letters – #4
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – #5
Only the Paranoid Survive – #6
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold – #7
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – #8
Truman – #9
Shantaram – #10
The Maltese Falcon – #11
The Shadow of the Wind – #12
Survey of the New Testament – #13
Calvin & Hobbes – #14
Celtic Daily Prayer – #15
Managing the Nonprofit Organization – #16
A Wrinkle in Time – #17
The Practice of the Presence of God – #18
Catch 22 – #19
The Tortilla Curtain – #20
The Kingdom of God is a Party – #21
Earthkeeping – #22
Reviving Ophelia – #23
The Grapes of Wrath – #24
Peanuts – #25