A Paradox of Power: An Analysis of Guns and Weaponry in Chicago and San Francisco
Richard Wright’s Native Son and Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon both
feature characters intimately involved, whether through social standing or career
hierarchy, in murder and death. In both novels, there is a high emphasis placed on
murder. Though guns are very present in each case of murder and death, they are not the
weapons used by Native Son’s Bigger and Maltese Falcon’s Sam Spade. Though Bigger
always has a gun in his possession, its use is absent from the two killings he commits,
while Spade doesn’t even carry a gun. Typically a symbol of power, the “absence” of the
gun in each novel establishes a paradox of control. In place of a gun, the protagonists turn
to other weapons and methods to help them fulfill their missions in their respective cities.
The weapons also reflect how Bigger and Sam fit into the niche of their city. Bigger’s
continuous questioning of his purpose in racially divided Chicago fuels his reliance on a
gun for protection, whereas Sam Spade’s lack of gun demonstrates his omniscience and
dominance over San Francisco. Finally, these relationships offer a broader view into the
city-specific way each novel handles death. Whereas in Native Son, the central action
revolves around the psychological tension of death, in The Maltese Falcon, death is the
inciting incident of the plot rather than the core focus. Both novels’ portrayal of death
relates back to the original notion of absent gun use; Bigger’s reliance on a gun’s
perceived protection inhibits his power in the novel, whereas Spade’s defiance of
protection elevates him above the murders, reducing them to a generic detective novel
plot device.
Though they are both different characters with radically different needs for guns,
Bigger and Spade refrain from using guns in two novels heavily focused on death.
Through the course of the novel, Bigger’s gun is always present, even though he kills two
women without firing a shot. Though the first murder is an accident and the novel’s
descriptions demonstrate Bigger in a moment of panic, he also maintains a certain degree
of control as he smothers Mary to death: “His muscles flexed taut as steel and he pressed
the pillow, feeling the bed give slowly, evenly, but silently. Then suddenly… her body
was still,” (86). It is after he murders Mary that Bigger realizes the reality of his situation,
and retrieves his gun: “He felt something heavy sagging in his shirt; it was the gun… He
shoved it under the pillow,” (93). Only after he has murdered Mary does Bigger lose the
control he exhibited while murdering and decapitating Mary, and feel the need for his
gun, the weapon one would typically use to execute a murder. A gun would have lent the
murder a degree of intention that Bigger certainly lacks until his moment of panic.
Though Bigger’s second murder of the novel is no accident, it is still committed
out of fear. Bigger is still in possession of his gun, but he decides not to use it (235).
Instead, he uses a brick to gruesomely murder Bessie. The description of the narrative
makes the murder almost mechanical, and deprives Bigger of emotion:
“He was ready. The brick was in his hand. In his mind his hand traced a quick
invisible arc through the cold air of the room; high above his head his hand
paused in fancy and imaginatively swooped down to where he thought her head
must be… He lifted the brick again and again, until in falling it struck a sodden
mass that gave softly but stoutly to each landing blow… How many times he had
lifted the brick and brought it down he did not know. All he knew was that… the
job was done,” (237).
In this narrative, Bigger exhibits the same conditional control he had while murdering
Mary. With this murder, Bigger thinks he has gained power from manipulating the cops,
Mary’s family, and Bessie. However, he still feels the need to keep the gun close by for
security. Though he wants to derive a sense of power without relying on the gun, his fear
of retribution forces him to keep the gun for protection. In this way, Bigger limits the
power he could perceivably gain from his murders, demonstrated by his reliance on his
gun as a defense mechanism. Since he is at the mercy of his impending capture, which
happens after he murders Bessie, Bigger is still powerless, therefore, is still in need of his
gun. The fact that Bigger has the gun in both murders demonstrates his attempts to be
powerful. Because he carries the gun for protection rather than intention, he is not
powerful at all.
Spade also has no need for a gun, which paradoxically establishes his strong
power dynamics throughout the novel. Upon receiving the call that Archer, his partner in
crime, is murdered, Spade arrives at the crime scene with nothing except “tobacco, keys,
and money,” (12) in his pockets. After Spade investigates the crime scene, Tom and
Dundy interrogate Spade, as he is a suspect in Archer’s murder. When Dundy asks
Spade, “What kind of gun do you carry?” Spade responds, “None. I don’t like them
much. Of course there are some in the office,” (18). Spade then goes on to frustrate the
policemen, and they leave the interrogation having found out no information from Spade
regarding Archer’s death. Spade’s lack of gun is an extension of his psyche; he is so
confident in his powers of manipulation and secrets that using a gun for protection is
unnecessary in his world.
While Bigger demonstrates conditional control using a brick to murder Bessie,
Spade participates in a mechanical action where he is able to express his utmost control:
rolling cigarettes. After Spade gets the call about his dead partner, most of his routine
between the fifteen minutes that pass before he leaves revolves around him taking
excruciating care rolling a cigarette.
“Spade’s thick fingers made a cigarette with deliberate care, sifting a measured
quantity of tan flakes down into curved paper, spreading the flakes so that they
lay equal at the ends with a slight depression in the middle, thumbs rolling the
paper’s inner edge down and up under the outer edge as forefingers pressed it
over, thumbs and fingers sliding to the paper’s cylinder’s ends to hold it even
while tongue licked the flap, left forefinger and thumb pinching their end while
right forefinger and thumb smoothed the damp seam, right forefinger and thumb
twisting their end and lifting the other to Spade’s mouth,” (11).
Just as the narrative depicting Bigger’s brick murder is apathetic, so too is the narrative
revolving around Spade’s cigarette making. Spade’s cigarette rolling is another forum in
which Spade has utmost agency over a situation, just as he does when he is purposefully
frustrating the cops that come to interrogate him as a suspect in Archer’s murder. While
both characters feel control in these discrete situations, Bigger still needs a gun, even if
he doesn’t fire, to feel secure in his position, whereas Spade never has to doubt the power
he holds over his cigarette, and his city.
The weapons Bigger and Spade use are a commentary on either the social or
professional urban environment they inhabit. In Native Son, Bigger’s relationship to his
weapons is tied to the racially divided city he has grown up in. Bigger has always felt like
an outsider who has never been accepted into the white man’s world of Chicago.
Throughout his life, white people have existed in a different world than he has. Bigger
manifests that difference into anger that even he cannot understand. “That was the way he
lived; he passed his days trying to defeat or gratify powerful impulses in a world he
feared,” (42). His binary analysis of his world causes Bigger to be constantly on guard
when Mary and Jan, two affluent white people, start to treat him like he is their equal.
Instead of relishing this short-lived racial freedom, Bigger interprets their
behavior towards him as condescension. “He felt he had no physical existence at all right
then; he was something he hated, the badge of shame which he knew was attached to a
black skin. It was a shadowy region, a No Man’s Land, the ground that separated the
white world from the black that he stood upon. He felt naked, transparent; he felt that this
white man, having helped to put him down, having helped to deform him, held him up
now to look at him and be amused. At that moment he felt toward Mary and Jan a dumb,
cold, and inarticulate hate,” (67). Even in this encounter, Bigger is incapable of
understanding where he fits into the world. Mary and Jan’s invitation to be their equal is
not malicious, but Bigger only sees himself as a mere joke in their lives. Since he is a
perpetual outsider in both the world Mary and Jan believe in and the city he inhabits,
Bigger is constantly on guard, which is why he carries around his gun. This outward
anger is actually a projection of Bigger’s frustration at his lack of purpose in a white
world. After Bigger is caught, he reflects in his cell that: “… having accepted the moral
guilt and responsibility for that murder… had made him feel free for the first time in his
life…” (274). Ultimately, these murders are the only way in which Bigger feels like he
has a purpose in life, which is reflected by the control he exhibits while murdering.
In contrast, Spade is involved in a profession where his knowledge of San Francisco
and other people’s secrets outweighs his use for a gun, which is a strange approach to
investigating murder. As opposed to unconfident, purposeless Bigger, Spade treats San
Francisco as if he is the king of that particular domain. In lieu of a gun, his preferred
weapon of choice is his knowledge of how other people operate. Spade’s confidence is
seldom explicitly stated; rather it is exemplified in the ways the other characters involved
in the falcon chase present themselves around Spade. Equally suspicious of everyone’s
disguises, Brigid and Cairo feel the constant need to have a gun as a form of protection.
In Spade’s initial encounter with Cairo, Cairo pulls a pistol on Spade while he searches
the room. Spade quickly knocks Cairo unconscious: “Spade emptied the unconscious
man’s pockets one by one, working methodically, moving the lax body when necessary,
making a pile of the pockets’ contents on the desk,” (47). The dexterity and relative calm
Spade exhibits while searching Cairo stands in stark contrast to the way in which Cairo
originally planned to search Spade’s office. Interestingly enough, after Cairo wakes up
and Spade returns his gun, Cairo still feels the need to wield it. In fact, when there is a
gun in the room, Brigid and Cairo usually pursue it. “Cairo gurgled and put a hand inside
his coat, forced it straight out to the side, and twisted it until the clumsy flaccid fingers
opened to let the black pistol fall down on the rug. Brigid O’Shaughnessy quickly picked
up the pistol,” (69). Even after Spade and Brigid spend the night together, Brigid feels the
need to sleep with a gun under her pillow for protection. Spade’s ease in handling his
situation enables him to effectively manipulate the insecurities that both Brigid and Cairo
represent. Spade’s ability to extend this type of manipulation to equally diffident
characters not directly involved in the falcon chase, such as Tom and Dundy, lends him
the power to see their ulterior motives and secrets.
Finally, though each novel involves two crucial murders, the urban and professional
settings that pervade Bigger and Spade’s lives define the way in which death shapes each
novel. In Native Son, the driving action of the plot revolves around Bigger’s internal
struggle of death. In the first two books of the novel, Bigger is more concerned about his
anger towards whites, which blinds him to the implications of death. This initial anger
metastasizes into a need for freedom he thinks is found through murder and manipulation.
However, it is only when he loses a gun in Book III that Bigger finally confronts his,
“fear of death before which he was naked and without defense; he had to go forward and
meet his end like any other living thing upon the earth. And regulating his attitude toward
death was the fact that he was black, unequal, and despised,” (274-275). Forcibly
deprived of the protection of a gun for the first time in the novel, Bigger demonstrates the
same kind of anger and thinking he presents in Books I and II, but now those thoughts are
internally directed instead of externally projected onto the white population.
As he confronts his own vulnerability, Bigger struggles with his own thoughts on
accepting responsibility for the murders, not from a standpoint of freedom or belonging,
but from a standpoint of his own mortality. At the very end of the novel, Bigger no longer
fears the world in the same way he did when he was unable to fully take responsibility for
his actions. Before he is taken to the chair, Bigger reflects on his impending execution:
“In self-defense he shut out the night and day from his mind, for if he had thought of the
sun’s rising and setting, of the moon or the stars, of clouds or rain, he would have died a
thousand deaths before they took him to the chair. To accustom his mind to death as
much as possible, he made all the world beyond his cell a vast grey land where neither
night nor day was, peopled by strange men and women whom he could not understand,
but with those lives he longed to mingle once before he went,” (418). Bigger’s evolving
understanding of character allows him to see his actions as something within himself as
opposed to something external. This acceptance of life makes it all the more unfortunate
when Bigger is ultimately executed. However, he dies without feeling the need for
protection, and finally understanding a purpose, which gives him a new type of power.
In Maltese Falcon, death drives the plot of the novel rather than the internal conflict.
The crux of the book is not to find out who murdered Archer; rather, it is simply the
starting point for the mystery revolving around the falcon to start, reducing this murder,
and the subsequent murder of the tall man, into useful plot devices. As previously
mentioned, Spade responds to Archer’s death with a lack of emotion. At the crime scene,
he continues his calculated indifference. “‘It’s tough, him getting it like that. Miles had
his faults same as the rest of us, but I guess he must’ve had some good points too.’ ‘I
guess so,’ Spade agreed in a tone that was utterly meaningless, and went out of the alley,”
(16). This death spurs on the rest of the action; after Archer’s death, Brigid’s initial
disguise is revealed, and Spade becomes enmeshed in the chase for the titular Maltese
Falcon.
Just as the first murder of the novel spurs the beginning of the mystery, the second
murder occurs when it’s needed for the latter-half of the novel’s events. Even though this
second murder is described in bloodier detail than the original murder, Spade treats it
with the same manner in which he handled Archer’s murder. “The tall man stood in the
doorway… He said, ‘You know—’ and then the liquid bubbling came up in his throat and
submerged whatever else he said… The sight of his bloody hand brought not the least nor
briefest of changes to Spade’s face,” (157). Though Spade has probably witnessed
countless murders in his profession, his lack of proper emotional response is highlighted
by Effie’s reasonable reaction to the events she just saw transpire: “Effie Perine, wan and
trembling and holding herself upright by means of a hand on the corridor-door’s knob
and her back against its glass, whispered: ‘Is—is he—?’ ‘Yes. Shot through the chest,
maybe half a dozen times.’ Spade began to wash his hands… ‘If he— Why in the hell
couldn’t he had stood up long enough to say something?’ He frowned at the girl, rinsed
his hands again, and picked up a towel. ‘Pull yourself together. For Christ’s sake don’t
get sick on me now!” (158). It is through Effie that the reader gleams the true gruesome
nature with which the tall man died, as Spade’s reaction seems to indicate that this man’s
death was nothing out of the ordinary. Spade demonstrates the apathy that is reflected in
the novel’s structure: death is not given proper respect because Spade does not give it
proper respect, reducing the deaths to plot devices and making them typical tropes of
detective fiction.
Tying the theme of death back to the original notion of absent or unused guns, the
deficient gun use in Native Son reflects Bigger’s need to feel like he is in control,
however his gun is a necessary protection. In the first two books, Bigger kills with two
weapons that are not his gun because. To Bigger, exercising control and having a purpose
in life is powerful. His gun is his protection, as he has spent his entire life feeling the
need to be protected from a city in which he feels like an outsider. This perception of
alienation is why Native Son’s death drama revolves around Bigger’s psychological
tension surrounding death. The gun and the additional murder weapons are simply
extensions of his two conflicting drives: the drive to protect himself from death, and the
drive to feel like he has control and purpose for once in his life. Bigger’s thoughts on
death ultimately progress towards an acceptance of his actions without harboring anger.
Devoid of any weapons, and need for protection or purpose, he is finally able to accept
his death. In The Maltese Falcon, the absence of the gun demonstrates the absence of the
relative importance of murder. Both murders of the book are described with calculated
coldness. While they are important to the plot, the murders do not need to be powerful,
just as Spade does not need to carry a gun to be powerful. With this power, he is able to
demonstrate his control over all those involved in the mystery surrounding the falcon by
disarming the parties involved physically and mentally. By reducing the murders to plot
devices, the structure of the novel highlights the power Spade truly has. While everyone
else fears getting killed, Spade is able to utilize these vulnerabilities in order to get what
he wants: secrets. It is his lack of need for guns, such as Bigger’s acceptance at the end of
Native Son that gives both protagonists a paradoxically derived sense of power.