How the Yes movement can learn from The Maltese Falcon

In his mastery of language and his vision of society, Hammett is as great a writer within his limitations as Shakespeare is within his.

Is that hyperbole? I don’t think so. It’s not only the memorable individual characters, it’s the whole vision of a society in utter breakdown. In Shakespeare, it’s the end of Elizabethan England and the start of Jacobean Britain, with the newcomer Scottish king about to change all the rules. With Hammett, it’s 1920s America.

READ MORE: Concert to mark centenary of Scottish composer's birth

Steven Marcus, in his introduction to the collection of Hammett’s short stories, The Continental Op (London: Pan Books, 1977), describes the social world Hammett’s detective operates within. I have paraphrased a small part of it in the following paragraph.

The 1920s were the period of organised crime and gangsters taking over American society so thoroughly that they could run it as if it were doing “business as usual”. Society itself had become a fiction, concealing and misdirecting everyone away from what was actually going on. This is how a certain kind of society works.

The social world becomes Hobbesian, effectively a world of universal warfare, each against all, all against all, with only the proviso that the dominating crooks cannot co-operate with each other, and so are determined to annihilate each other and themselves. Others replace them. And everyone is caught up in the process.

No-one is exempt. Social relations are entirely based upon lies and mistrust. Just as an individual might suffer particular forms of psychological self-destruction or breakdown, equally so an entire society can develop in this way, and all the individuals, groups and communities within it are taken up by the condition for as long as it prevails.

Marcus describes Hammett’s vision and how the Detective hero operates within it precisely: “I trust no one.”

And he goes on: “When Hammett turns to the respectable world, the world of respectable society, of affluence and influence, of open personal and political power, he finds only more of the same. The respectability of respectable American society is as much a fiction and a fraud as the phony respectable society fabricated by the criminals. Indeed, he unwaveringly represents the world of crime as a reproduction in both structure and detail of the modern capitalist society it depends on, preys off, and is part of. He not only continually juxtaposes and connects the ambiguously fictional worlds of art and writing with the fraudulently fictional worlds of society; he connects them, juxtaposes them, and sees them in dizzying and baffling interaction. […] It is into this bottomlessly equivocal, endlessly fraudulent and brutally acquisitive world that Hammett precipitates the Op.”

The world as Hammett describes it in his Continental Op stories, written in the 1920s and set mainly in San Francisco, evidently applies most appropriately but more extensively to the western world generally, in the 2020s.

And it seems appropriate to commemorate this chaos of crime, these criminal cartels who rule the roost, or acquiesce in their regional status so spinelessly, in the last weeks of the tenth year since 2014.

You remember the question: Should Scotland be an independent country?

It’s been more than 10 long years since September 18, 2014. How do we see that history now? How might Hammett have written the story if he were coming at it now?

Well, just like Shakespeare, just as it might be anywhere, it’s an old, old story and it needs to be told afresh if it’s going to hit home. It will always need to be spelled out again and again, because people deny or forget it. It tells us why half the population of Scotland or just more or just less than half voted 10 years ago and would still vote now AGAINST independence.

And maybe that’s the question we should be asking Unionists now, in the most polite manner, of course, with all due respect and deference, with every gesture and practice of politeness. This is it: Here you have what you voted for, the last 10 years have given you your answer. Is this really what you wanted? Is this what you want?

READ MORE: Uncovering women’s fight against tyranny

The succession of clowns in Westminster? The murderous incompetence, the malevolent greed? The rampant vanity, the exercised entitlement? And in Scotland?

Analyse it soberly and closely: Why would a people vote against their own country’s independence?

Perhaps Dashiell Hammett would have supplied three groups of people, dynamically interwoven in the plot of his novel. Each of them would be motivated differently to vote against their own independence.

There would be three reasons behind these motivations. Each of these reasons is a human reason.

And therefore understandable, and therefore, we can be sympathetic. Up to a point. The point is where judgement happens. And that means not being “WHEESHT” at all.

But we must begin with the understanding that these people – these characters in Hammett’s imagined fiction – cannot be polarised as “other”. They are us.

“They” IS “us”. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are not good role models. They are human potential brought to some of its worst extremes.

But it’s still human potential that’s at work. This is what all literature teaches.

This is why in Palestine and Ukraine people still write poems in the rubble of ruins. You write where you can, when you can, with your bloody broken fingers on the prison wall, if it comes to that. Until your exhaustion defeats you. And that’s what the enemy wants.

But this is the only thing that ultimately tells us, “We are human beings”. And that’s why there are always some people who want to stop from happening such things as reading, writing, and sympathising, and understanding, and making things different, changing things for the better. Death is much better for business than life.

There are three principal reasons behind this: Ignorance, fear and malevolence.

I’ve heard it said that the people who voted No in 2014 did so from reasons that can be characterised as “foolish” or “cowardly” or “monstrous”.

I’ve heard it said they were and presumably still are “fools, cowards and monsters” – to varying degrees and extents. And there are many overlaps between these characterisations of human potential being exercised.

These overlaps, or interconnections, or intricacies of belief and motivation, are complex and subtle and nuanced. And we have to remember that being foolish, being cowardly and even being monstrous are utterly human capacities.

Anyone who has been afraid of anything knows what it is to want to retreat. Anyone can persuade themselves to do something that turns out to be a bad mistake.

And anyone can see the benefits of a situation that they’ll enjoy, even at the cost of many other people and future generations. It’s surely horrible to think of what human beings have actually done to each other across centuries and difficult to think about what we’re capable of. The future might yield even more terrible examples of human potential at its worst.

These terms appear to be derogatory, loaded with contempt. They are. In a genre novel or a film, these would be the villains. Their characterisation seems to be absolute, but it is not, for they are all human capacities. This is another kind of human potential exemplified. And I need to explain this.

Let’s say that FOOLS are people who for better or worse are indoctrinated or have been self-indoctrinated into believing lies that to others are clearly self-evidently not true. Children, young people and people whose minds are naive are the most susceptible. Every religion lives by this law.

Let’s say that COWARDS are people who have been scared into believing that they must not do anything, or things will get worse. The elderly are most vulnerable. Legality enforces this.

And let’s describe MONSTERS as people who know very well how things can be made better but choose to enrich themselves by making other people poor.

Or killing them or letting them die. Or taking away their language, all their forms of cultural self-expression. Of never letting them play their own music. Adults develop knowledge and make such choices knowingly. Government politicians and corporate “leaders” of all kinds almost always exemplify this.

Literature shows us innumerable examples of characters whose dispositions, situations, dynamics and relationships exemplify all these aspects of humanity. It shows how they arise, how they fall and what can help to bring them down. Hammett and Shakespeare are only two of many writers whose works of fiction illustrate these things again and again.

Imagine these groups as factions in one of Hammett’s hardboiled stories. In Red Harvest (1929), the Op sets one faction against another until everyone destroys themselves.

Something similar happens when Clint Eastwood rides into town in Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollars (1964): “The Baxters on one side, the Rojos on the other, and me smack in the middle.” So how might our Scottish circumstance be imagined? If we’re thinking of a Dashiell Hammett version of 2014 from the perspective of 2024, how can our condition be addressed now?

“Wheesht for indy”?

No. Talk about it. Write about it. And pour out all the contempt, the disgust, all the healthy disdain you can muster and if you have the energy, let loose the whipcrack laughter, bring it all down upon the villains who exploit and misrule us so badly.

So, to counterpoint the above: To oppose the FOOLS, let’s think of children, young people and people whose minds are naïve, still open to discovery, to finding out for themselves, to asking questions. Such people have the great potential to oppose foolishness, for the simple questions should be asked first, and answered clearly.

To oppose the COWARDS, think about the older people who can most strongly outdistance the fearful and who might look with scorn upon cowardice because they have acquired wisdom with their knowledge and experience, and this gives them a depth of courage like no others. They have lived long lives and know things that strengthen them, in ways the young do not know.

And to oppose the MONSTERS, we might propose a sense of adulthood, an actively knowing intelligence, neither naive nor sage, but alive with a common morality, a communal understanding and a sympathetic engagement. Anywhere on earth, this adulthood comes with an experience and knowledge of the arts, music, painting, sculpture, literature, drama, storytelling, poetry. These things are essential for life and nourish all experience and knowledge. When they have been lost or oppressed, they can be reclaimed. That’s our business too.

In their book, Scotland After Britain: The Two Souls of Scottish Independence (London: Verso, 2022), James Foley, Ben Wray and Neil Davidson very concisely summed up the opposition we were facing in 2014.

It hasn’t gone away. Here’s what they say: “The most obvious difference between the two sides [Yes for independence or No for the Union] can be expressed by identifying the forces which stood behind the No campaign: the supposedly neutral institutions of the British state, in particular the Treasury and the BBC; most British capitalists; Ukip and the British National Party; the Orange Order; the entire press, with the sole exception of the Sunday Herald – the more right-wing (such as the Express and the Mail), the more rabidly Unionist they tended to be; President Obama and his ordained Democratic successor, Hillary Clinton; the EU Commission and the rulers of all nation-states with insurgent nationalist movements.

"In short, behind the three Unionist parties [Conservative, Labour and LibDems] stood the representatives and spokespersons of the British and international capitalist class, supporters of the current imperial ordering of the world system, and reactionaries and fascists of every description.”

(They might have added, the Pope.) RB Cunninghame Graham, in his book A Brazilian Mystic, Being the Life and Miracles of Antonio Conselheiro (1925), suggests one way that a seemingly intractable position can be brought to an end: “No challenge is so fatal to any system as to predict its speedy ending, for at once the state of things so challenged becomes of no account to the believers in the prophecy. [….] There being no accommodation possible between a Government that held the usual possible doctrine that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday, and heralded all change as progress, being quite positive that they were the repository of all wisdom and all common sense, and on the other hand a prophet who esteemed all worldly wisdom a mere tinkling cymbal, nothing was left but to fight out the question to the end. This was what both sides were prepared to do.”

READ MORE: Come and listen to our Voices at poetry reading in Glasgow

It can be done. It is always possible. The enemy can be defeated. But they will always regroup. The battle continues. The Continental Op, in Hammett’s stories, or Sam Spade, in The Maltese Falcon, or a range of central characters moving through the worlds of Hammett’s San Francisco, of Shakespeare’s Elsinore or Vienna, the Man with No Name in Leone’s San Miguel, or any of us in our imagined, fictionalised Hammett-inspired Scotland and the UK, from 2014-2024, might say, as I noted at the beginning of this essay, “I trust no-one”.

But there is one place where trust can in fact be placed, where truths can be found, of more than one kind, and where, if you work hard at it, and take the investigations as far as they can go, and further, you will find realities you can rely on. That is the domain of the arts.

To go back to Steven Marcus, this is not “the fraudulently fictional worlds of society” but rather “the ambiguously fictional worlds of art and writing”.

But you have to connect these worlds, to juxtapose them against each other, to see them “in dizzying and baffling interaction”. And that’s where all governments and political parties and power brokers and the Machiavellis of society’s machinations, all of them, fail. And that’s where we live.