I’ve been reading Ed Simon’s “Devil’s Contract,” about the history of the Faustian bargain, while watching AMC’s six-episode mini-series “Monsieur Spade,” which transplants Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade to the South of France in the 1960s, and that combination has sparked a peculiar line of thought: the fictional private detective is a Faustian figure.
Seen from that angle, the detective is something of an emissary, coming to collect on the devil’s behalf. Maybe you killed a rich man for a fortune, and even got away with it for a few decades; now someone’s at your door with his fedora and notebook and hip flask, the cigarette in his mouth cocked at an insouciant angle, and he’s ready to send you to ride Old Sparky—unless you prefer one last shootout, of course. Perhaps Hammett considered this subtext when he described Spade in “The Maltese Falcon” as an almost devilish figure, his brow and nostrils angled into sharp v’s like a cartoon Satan.
The retired Spade in the AMC series doesn’t resemble his novelistic counterpart at all. Instead, we have Clive Owen’s squarish visage, paired with exhausted eyes and a deliberate gait. Everyone else in rural France seems to have made their own Faustian bargains with capitalism or politics, but he appears content to lounge in the pool on his dead wife’s estate, contemplating his life’s choices while draining bottles of wine and smoking endless cigarettes. He is, to quote yet another fictional detective in a much faster town, committed to doing as little as possible.
Indeed, the series moves at a stately pace that would have driven Hammett mad—his books were short and speedy (“Red Harvest,” for instance, manages to squeeze a multi-front gang war and dozens of killings into its relatively compact length). If anything, the slow burn reminded me of Raymond Chandler, who devoted plenty of paragraphs to the detective’s existential despond: recall his most famous character, Philip Marlowe, studying chess boards and corpses at length for signs of anything deeper.
Owen has made a notable career of underplaying his characters; his Spade has a spiritual connection with his character in “Croupier,” whose unblinking stare and low monotone belie an inner tension about to crack. It’s the opposite of Bogart’s terrier-like performance in “The Maltese Falcon,” all wry grins and snappy one-liners, and it fits the material—this is an aged and exhausted man. Your own mileage may vary.
Ed Simon’s book, meanwhile, details how the Faustian bargain has remained a compelling tale throughout history because it echoes the compromises we all make. That’s if you cast aside the spiritual angle—but even in detective fiction, the spirits can be very real, as in “Falling Angel,” the novel by William Hjortsberg later adapted into the (far superior) movie “Angel Heart” with Mickey Rourke and Robert De Niro. At the risk of spoiling a 50-year-old novel and 37-year-old movie, the story centers on a literal bargain with Satan—although who sold his soul, and for what, remains a question until the very end. Sometimes the devil really did make you do it.
Very nice, Nick. And why am I not surprised you read Fallen Angel??? That's the literal Faustian deal. The detective as Fate. I like that....