"The Chocolate Falcon Fraud" by JoAnna Carl

This month marks the 75th anniversary of the 3rd adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's epic detective novel, The Maltese Falcon...the one with Humphrey Bogart and the statue of a bird. All kidding aside, The Maltese Falcon should rank among the top 2 greatest mystery novels of all time (the other being The Hound of The Baskervilles) and the film actually improves on it, particularly with the ending, which leaves out an additional scene in the book that sort-of cheapens our conclusions about the character of Sam Spade by implying that he's already over the drama, whereas the Bogart version of Spade is not likely to forget what happened after "..a couple of rough nights.." If you haven't seen it, please do.

Now...I realize the only surviving participant in the 1941 film is the prop falcon statue. There are two in existence. They both have aged to the point where they appear to be made of solid milk chocolate, in color and texture - like a chocolate bunny. Some replicas of this prop are gold-plated, so they resemble a solid chocolate falcon wrapped in gold foil..

With this train of thought in mind, it was easy for me to see the appeal of a mystery novel with a title that includes the words "Falcon" and "Chocolate". Right off the bat, I will say that there is no chocolate Maltese Falcon statue in the book, even though the protagonist specializes in designing original gourmet chocolate confections. The only chocolate falcons we get are described in a way that resembles those holiday chocolate candies Russell Stover offers - marshmallow-filled chocolates in the shape of Santa Claus, Halloween pumpkins and Easter eggs. These Falcon candies are offered by our heroine at a Maltese Falcon film festival/fan expo, a convention you might think would exist, given the popularity of the film, but is made-up for the plot of the book.

The Chocolate Falcon Fraud is a cozy - a sub-genre of mystery novel in which there's a puzzle to be solved, but it's not a tough puzzle; the real appeal is that the heroine (always a female protagonist; the closest you get to a male cozy detective series is M.C. Beaton's Hamish Macbeth novels and Lawrence Block's Bernie Rhoddenbar books, which are mostly classified as police procedural and caper novels, respectively, but Hamish is a constable in a cozy Highland village and Bernie's a thief that owns a shop, so they fit in there) runs a shop that makes gourmet chocolate with her aunt, so the author gets to better her books with recipes and trivia about fudge and chocolate foodstuffs for chocoholics. It could be adapted into a film for the Hallmark Movies and Mysteries channel. More on that in a bit, but getting back to what a cozy is...they're light in subject matter and not too explicit in violent content. It's Miss Marple and Murder, She Wrote territory, where a headline on the front page of the New York Daily News might actually read, "Murder Stymies Cops!"

Lee Woodyard is our eager amateur sleuth. Her stepson from a former marriage has come back into town to become the target of an elaborate kidnapping plot by a group of con artists baiting him with a ruse about a possible 3rd falcon prop statue used in the 1941 film that he wants to purchase. Doppelgangers for Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Mary Astor show up. Gawdy keychain-size replicas of the falcon pop up. This is good stuff, but my big gripe (aside from the lack of a proper falcon statue made of solid milk chocolate) is that the cool Falcon riffs kick in halfway through the second half of this book. Most of what we get is teen soap opera about Jeff, the aforementioned stepson/scapegoat, whose transformation from ne'r-do-well emo teen punk to nerdy film buff/movie memorabillia tchotchke collector with a girlfriend is sincere...or if he's on the shenanigans.

The book is okay...but JoAnna Carl (a pseudonym used by Eve K. Sandstrom) dropped the ball by overlooking the most obvious gag a mystery novel with a title like that could have. It has a lot of nice ideas..I do wish there was a bigger fandom for The Maltese Falcon.

Should The Chocolate Falcon Fraud be adapted into a film for Hallmark Movies and Mysteries? Yeah! It would be terrific! I would like to suggest Danielle Harris play Lee Woodyard. I can easily picture her in a mystery involving a popular genre film, a fan convention and collectors and tchotchkes...and Will Wheaton could play her love interest, because Danielle's husband in real-life kind-of resembles Wheaton..if Wheaton was pumping iron a bit. And Jennifer Tilly could play Lee's Aunt Nettie, so yeah, this would be awesome.

And there will be a falcon statue made of solid milk chocolate..with marshmallow center, of course.

The Magrs Method of Book Reporting: "Hammet Unwritten" by Owen Fitzstephen (aka, Gordon McAlpine)

Encapsulate the plot of the book in one sentence?

Writer Dashiell Hammet suspects the black falcon statuette he once kept as a momento before giving it away might be a powerful talisman key to his early success...and sharp decline in his career and personal life in its absence.

What's your verdict?

Dashiell Hammet worked as a private detective for the Pinkerton Detective Agency and quit when his writing career blossomed. He did claim that the villains featured in The Maltese Falcon were based on people he encountered while on assignment at Pinkerton's, but the falcon case was pure fiction; the statuette was inspired by a jeweled skull owned by Phil Haultain,  a Pinkerton agent who worked with Hammet in the 1920s and kept it in a safe in his office.

Hammet Unwritten is a fictionalized retelling of Hammet's life, particularly the final two and a half decades, in which he seemed to be adrift, creatively,  personally and professionally. In 1934, he wrote The Thin Man, his last novel, which inspired a successful film franchise starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick & Nora Charles. He contributed screen story treatments, or "scriptments" for two of the film adaptation's five sequels in the form of short novellas, but otherwise,  the remaining years of his life were spent coasting on his celebrity. He often recieved huge advances from publishers for exclusive publishing rights to future novels he would pitch (often he claimed he was working on a novel that sounded like a contemporary take on Swiss Family Robinson) and there is that strange fragment of a novel, Tulip, which was cobbled in with a collection of older short stories after his death, The Big Knockover.

In Unwritten, what we've got is a sequel to Falcon starring Hammet. Gordon McAlpine imagines Hammet's last case for Pinkerton's as "The Black Falcon Affair", imagines Hammet buying the "fake" falcon statuette at a police auction, then giving it away years later to Moira O'Shea, ( the "real" Brigid O'Shaunessey of Falcon ) to humor her outrageous tale that the bird is actually a powerful totem that brings good fortune to whoever owns it. As the novel spans the years after the handover, Hammet keeps having chance encounters with the other "real world" counterparts to his characters, including Joel Cairo and Kasper Gutman,  and an encounter with film director John Huston on the set of the classic film adaptation. His slow realization that this falcon might be the real thing leads to the finale, when he gets a chance to get it back.

The Maltese Falcon, in my opinion, is the greatest American Mystery novel ever written. I would also rank it as one of the top 5 greatest mystery/dective novels of all time. If you haven't read it, or only saw the film with Humphrey Bogart,  or encountered neither, I don't believe it's necessary to enjoy Hammet Unwritten without having done so. At it's heart, this book is about a man coping with his personal crisis of confidence.  Despite the fact that it's fiction, it's a consistent portrayal of the real Dashiell Hammet in his later years. McAlpine must have wanted to imagine a more cinematic biography for those final decades by making Hammet an artist ( and not just a troubled alcoholic ) and setting him on a quest.

What surprises did the book hold, if any?

There's an excellent biography of Dashiell Hammet by Diane Johnson called Dashiell Hammet, which I had read when I was in High School. Nothing in Hammet Unwritten happened to Dashiell Hammet,  but the man in this novel is the same man I read about in that biography years ago. In real life, his creative burnout was caused by a lifetime of drinking, a long-standing relationship of convenience (my opinion) with socialite/playwright Lillian Hellman, and lack of motivation for writing more. Plus, in retrospect...his life was half over by the time his last novel had been published.

It's also short, which is a nice surprise.  So many books these days tend to be written per quota or weight requirement and suffer for that. A good book does not need to weigh as much as a brick to be entertaining.

Which scenes will stay with you?

Quite a few - there's a scene where Hammet has a reunion with the counterpart to Sam Spade's secretary Effie and finds a dog-earred copy of The Maltese Falcon in her desk drawer. He decides to pencil in some new dialogue in her copy to express his feelings about her in contrast to how the character of Effie was portrayed in the story...and he can't get the words out, nothing comes to him. There's another scene where Hammet's writer's block has gotten so bad that he's begun hoarding typewriter ribbons in hopes that he'll need them, or upgrading to newer typewriters in hope that his output will improve. There's also a scene that suggests his reasons for re-enlisting in the army as a middle-aged man were to get away from the writing desk, even resorting to having his teeth removed after being initially rejected for having bad teeth.

Give us a good quote.

Sure - check out the gallery below.