(no subject)
Has anyone out there ever read The Maltese Falcon? I have just finally read it, and am curious about something.
When Gutman is telling Spade about the bird's history (p. 113 of the Vintage Books paperback edition)
we (and Spade) are told that the bird was stolen in Paris in 1931. Gutman refers to this as being "seventeen years ago," a number he repeats in a later chapter as being how long he's been searching for the bird.
That would mean the novel is set in 1948.
The novel was originally published in 1927. So, was Hammett deliberately setting it in the future? Or did he change the dates with later editions of the books to keep it contemporary? I haven't been able to track down any copy of it older than 1954 to check to see if there were changes.
If it was changed later, that makes the whole thing rather odd, that Gutman & Co. managed to carry on this search through Europe, Asia, and America without mentioning World War II!
If it was originaly written this way, that's rather intriguing, making the story an odd kind of speculative fiction, describing a noir future rather than a cynical view of the present, in the vein of the much later cyberpunk movement. It is, in a way, similarly the story of an ordinary man trying to keep his humanity in a dehumanizing world.
Or, alternatively, am I just bad at math or misreading something?
Has anyone else read it? Does anyone know if anything has been written about this? A cursory search didn't turn up anything, but it's hard to know what search terms to use here.
When Gutman is telling Spade about the bird's history (p. 113 of the Vintage Books paperback edition)
we (and Spade) are told that the bird was stolen in Paris in 1931. Gutman refers to this as being "seventeen years ago," a number he repeats in a later chapter as being how long he's been searching for the bird.
That would mean the novel is set in 1948.
The novel was originally published in 1927. So, was Hammett deliberately setting it in the future? Or did he change the dates with later editions of the books to keep it contemporary? I haven't been able to track down any copy of it older than 1954 to check to see if there were changes.
If it was changed later, that makes the whole thing rather odd, that Gutman & Co. managed to carry on this search through Europe, Asia, and America without mentioning World War II!
If it was originaly written this way, that's rather intriguing, making the story an odd kind of speculative fiction, describing a noir future rather than a cynical view of the present, in the vein of the much later cyberpunk movement. It is, in a way, similarly the story of an ordinary man trying to keep his humanity in a dehumanizing world.
Or, alternatively, am I just bad at math or misreading something?
Has anyone else read it? Does anyone know if anything has been written about this? A cursory search didn't turn up anything, but it's hard to know what search terms to use here.