Joe Gores and Hammett

Joe Gores died this week. Like his inspiration, Dashiell Hammett, Gores had led one of those packed American lives. He’d worked as a logger, truck driver, carnival roustabout, motel manager, teacher in Kenya and, again like Hammett, as a detective. It was Gores’ twelve year experience as a gumshoe that led him to write mystery novels.

There are fine tributes to Gores at The Rap Sheet and Mystery File, which say far more than I could about Gores’ career and contribution to the crime story.

Gores’ novel Hammett (1975) put its eponymous hero in a San Francisco-set mystery involving crooked politicians, gangsters, Oriental femme fatales and ex-Pinkerton agents. As the mystery progresses, the seeds are sown in Hammett’s mind for his masterwork, The Maltese Falcon.

The novel was made into a film by Francis Ford Coppolla’s Zoetrope Studio. It was a famously troubled production, going through many drafts and two directors, Nicolas Roeg and Wim Wenders. It’s rumoured too that Coppolla reshot  some of the scenes in the final cut. Gores was philosophical about the thing, describing Wenders as having “a very poor sense of what makes a story work” but judging the end product as “a pretty good B picture”. (These quotes are pulled from an extensive interview with Gores and Ross Thomas, who worked on the screenplay, in the Spring 1984 issue of The Armchair Detective.)

It is a very strange movie, but weirdly hypnotic for the Hammett buff. Frederic Forrest is wonderful in the title role, and there are nice cameos for Elisha Cook Jnr, Sylvia Sidney, Samuel Fuller and Ross Thomas. Trying to replicate the feel of a Bogart movie, many of the exteriors are shot on studio sets, creating an oppressive, artificial world. Ultimately, it’s a film of pieces, where valuable fragments fail to make up a cohesive whole. But it’s a film I return to again and again.