Dashiell Hammett "hardboiled mystery fiction"

When Lieut. Dundy and Tom interrogate him the offset time close to Archer's murder and indirectly accuse him of macrocosm responsible, he strikes a pose. Yet he also musters the wrath of innocence, which tells the reader that he has a definite moral reach:

"I've warned you your foot was going to slip one of these days," [Dundy] said.

dig do a depreciative mouth, raising his eyebrows. "Everybody's foot slips sometime," he replied with teasing mildness.

cut into smiled and shook his head. "No, I'll do nicely, thank you." He stop smiling. . . . "I don't like this. What are you sucking around for? suppose me, or get out and let me go to experience" (Hammett 306).

It turns out that Iva Archer, Miles's faithless wife and delve's lover, has accused Spade because she thought he (Spade) was two-timing her with BO. It develops, too, that Iva actually thinks that Spade might have extinguished Miles to get him out of the way: "Oh, Sam," she moaned, "did you kill him?" (Hammett 310). In the depiction of Sam's physical reaction to that question, Hammett conveys the message that Spade is non without emotional content, still less not without honor. He is genuinely shocked that Iva could think him so mean-spirited (or so in love with her) as to murder for reasons of selfish love. His retort to Iva's question:

Repeatedly, and importantly for the root of the action, Spade reverts to moral convention and an almost unflinching respect for human life. His methods are not manifestly morally conventional, unless his motives are. He reveals, for example, that he did not particularly like Miles Archer, and that BO "didn't do me a damned bit of harm by cleanup spot him" (Hammett 438). But human life qua life, as well as Spade's career professionalism, trumps the falcon and BO's Byzantine evil, as well as her perfect body:

Spade's phonation is the moral argument of MF, and that statement, regardless of the hardboiled seen-it-all persona, helps explain the favorable comparison of Hammett's detective fiction to Hemingway's literary fiction:

The "hardness" is the rigor of Spade's moral code.

Indeed, the "natural social function" is nothing less than natural law, which locates Spade's moral code in cosmic laws to which all must adhere if there is not to be the danger of moral chaos in the universe. The articulation of moral content, which until the last two pages of the novel is concealed commode grimaces and wisecracks, anchors Spade as a heroic figure, even though his pose is one of antihero.

"I don't want any more than of these informal talks. I've got nothing to tell you or the police and I'm God-damned degenerate of being called things by every crackpot on the metropolis payroll. If you want to see me, pinch me or subpoena me or something and I'll come down with my lawyer." He put his hat on his haid, said, "See you at the inquest, maybe," and stalked out (Hammett 394).

This is not to distinguish that Spade's motives are unreservedly pure, for he has, so to speak, been around the head off enough to recognize duplicity and to engage in it when it suits his purpose. He tells BO that he and Miles took "Miss Wonderly's" case not because they believed her story about her seduced sister but because she gave them two hundred dollars--"more than if you'd been grave the truth . . . and enough more to make
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