Webley-Forsby

Abstract “A Webley-Forsby 45-automatic, eight-shot,” Spade replies, responding to Polhaus’s request to identify Archer’s murder weapon. “They don’t make them any more.” In fact, they never did. Even under its actual name, Webley-Fosbery produced only 38-caliber eight-shot revolvers. Hammett, who got both the name and the caliber correct, almost certainly underestimated this gun’s rarity: some reports suggest that as few as 40 were manufactured. By making Spade able to recognize an impossibly rare weapon that he would have almost certainly never seen, Hammett was endowing his hero with the kind of specialized knowledge championed by Sherlock Holmes. But why does Huston’s film depart from Hammett’s text? On the one hand, “Forsby” sounds like “Thursby,” a near-rhyme linking Archer’s murder weapon to his suspected killer. On the other, The Maltese Falcon’s effect depends far less on precise verisimilitude than on convincing presentation. If Spade’s description of the gun sounds right, the audience will accept it. Would it also accept the following uncanny coinci- dence? The revolver’s original manufacturer, an Englishman prove far longer than Hammett’s 200 pages. The film, in other words, both abridges and expands its written source, providing a more exhaustive history. In doing so, it confirms Irving Thalberg’s remark, cited elsewhere in this book: “In the future, the movies will be the best record of how we once lived.” A contemporary viewer will likely mistake “Wells” for “Welles,” the Orson Welles whose own accounts of Charles Foster Kane and the Ambersons amount to counternarratives that resist Hollywood’s “history as usual.” As if to further the confusion, Orson Welles’s initial fame derived from his radio play of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, designed to resemble a breaking- news report. The mass panic caused by Welles’s show resulted not only from its perfect mimicry of the news (the harried announcers, abruptly cut off; the crackling static), but also from its audience’s late tuning in (many people had been listening to Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy). This latter factor seems peculiar to film, radio, and television. When, if ever, do we begin reading in the middle of a novel? Yet we often tune into a program already in progress, understanding and accepting the irretrievability of the missing scenes. Like Welles’s listeners, Spade enters the Falcon story in medias res: like them, he must learn to accept that story as a story, and not as something historically true.