Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon: Sam Spade’s story about Flitcraft’s Fugue indicates the Main Theme is Multiple Personality

What is the main theme of The Maltese Falcon? The title—referring to a thing as not being what it seems when perception is distorted by greed—is misleading. No, the main theme is that people may not be who they seem to be, because they have multiple personality.

For example, the novel’s femme fatale has at least three names: Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Miss Wonderly, and Miss LeBlanc. Are these just three of the aliases used by a criminal psychopath and pathological liar? Or is she a criminal psychopath and pathological liar who has multiple personality?

The main character, detective Sam Spade, is described in the novel’s first paragraph as looking like “a blond satan” (1), which suggests a person with a combination of good and evil, a Jekyll and Hyde.

The key to the main theme is the story that Sam Spade tells to Brigid O’Shaughnessy about Flitcraft’s fugue (left out of the movie).

Flitcraft’s Fugue

“Spade sat down in the armchair beside the table and without any preliminary, without an introductory remark of any sort, began to tell the girl about a thing that had happened some years before in the Northwest…

“At the beginning Brigid O’Shaughnessy listened with only partial attentiveness…but presently, as the story went on, it caught her more and more fully and she became still and receptive.

“A man named Flitcraft had left his real-estate-office, in Tacoma, to go to luncheon one day and had never returned. He did not keep an engagement to play golf after four that afternoon…His wife and children never saw him again…There was nothing to suggest that he had more than fifty or sixty dollars in his immediate possession at the time of his going…

“Well, that was in 1922. In 1927 I was with one of the big detective agencies in Seattle. Mrs. Flitcraft came in and told us somebody had seen a man in Spokane who looked a lot like her husband. I went over there. It was Flitcraft, all right. He had been living in Spokane for a couple of years as Charles—that was his first name—Pierce. He had an automobile-business that was netting him twenty or twenty-five thousand a year, a wife, a baby son, owned his home in a Spokane suburb, and usually got to play golf after four in the afternoon during the season…

“Here’s what had happened to him. Going to lunch he passed an office-building that was being put up—just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him…He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works…Life could be ended for him at random by a falling beam…

“He went to Seattle that afternoon…and from there by boat to San Francisco…and settled in Spokane and got married…

“How perfectly fascinating,” Brigid O’Shaughnessy said” (1, pp. 61-64).

The Main Theme

A fugue is when a person, often after a traumatic experience, travels to a different location and lives there under a new identity. This was discussed in past posts in regard to Agatha Christie’s real-life fugue. And as with Christie, it often indicates that the person has multiple personality.

So to understand the main theme of The Maltese Falcon, you have to understand the meaning of Sam Spade’s story about Flitcraft. The meaning is not that life is random, but that people switch among multiple identities.

1. Dashiell Hammett. The Maltese Falcon [1929]. New York, Vintage, 1992.