review of
Anne Capeci's The Maltese Dog
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 27, 2012

Have I finally reached, to use a favorite expression from Alfred Jarry, "precocious senility"? One might reasonably think so given how many kid's bks I've read & reviewed this yr. This must STOP! I am, after all, an adult w/ extremely complex tastes that absolutely WON'T be met by any kid's bk. So why did I read this? As I wrote in my review of The Malted Falcon ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3457691-the-malted-falcon ) that essentially is the companion piece to this:

"I recently acquired 3 bks whose titles & plots are take-offs of previously existing bks: The Malted Falcon, Captains Outrageous, & Android Karenina. This called my attn to there now being, apparently, a whole genre of such bks. Yesterday, I got a copy of The Maltese Dog - thusly adding to the collection. Fully expecting these bks to be trashily derivative I've decided to read all 4 anyway & review them b/c I'm somewhat fascinated by the genre."

The Malted Falcon was written for kids aged 8 to 12, basically elementary school kids, & The Maltese Dog appears to've been written for people of junior high school age. Does junior high even still exist? I wdn't know. Maybe it's middle school now or some such. Anyway, the detective in The Malted Falcon is a gecko in the 4th grade & the detective in The Maltese Dog is a dog who's the pet of a boy in the 9th grade. As a reader, I'm moving up in the world.

Both bks are take-offs of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. The Malted Falcon parallels the plot & the style, The Maltese Dog parallels the plot & directly references The Maltese Falcon by having Joe, the main human character, be reading Hammett's bk & self-consciously comparing his own adventures to that of Hammett's character Sam Spade:

""The worst thing is, now everyone is wondering who on the team could be guilty," Joe went on. "You should have seen the guys during team play - everyone looking sideways at everyone else. It's almost as bad as what's going on among the characters in The Maltese Falcon."

""Wishbone's ears perked up. The Maltese Falcon was one of his favorite mysteries - though he would have preferred a story about a Maltese dog. "If I remember the story right," Wishbone recalled, "Detective Sam Spade was surrounded by untrustworthy people, all looking for the same thing."" (p 35)

Like most kid's bks, the subtext of this is ethical: Joe's conduct is meant to be exemplary of how to conduct one's self under trying circumstances. This interests me but what led to my reading this was to find out how Hammett wd be used. Of course, it's interesting to think of Hammett's own personal experience of going to prison for contempt of court rather than testify against his fellow political activists. Hammett had integrity, his character Spade had integrity, & Capeci's bk revolves around this integrity:

"Joe thought of Sam Spade. Even when the cops and everyone else seemed to be against him, the detective did whatever he had to discover the truth about the murders and the Maltese falcon. Joe decided he would stick to his guns, too." (p 77)

"Wishbone sympathized with Joe. His situation was a lot like Sam Spade's in The Maltese Falcon. Spade found himself up against some sneaky, mean-spirited characters. The detective was at times searched at gunpoint, punched, and knocked unconscious. But he didn't back off the case. Apparently, Joe wasn't backing down either." (p 112)

My own sense of ethics is similar to this & I'm sure that if I went back to reading the SBS ("Scholastic Book Service", as I recall) bks I read as a kid I'd find them akin to this "Scholastic" bk (I assume that there's a direct lineage between these publishers). In the "About Anne Capeci" afterward there's this:

"Like Wishbone and Joe, Anne was fascinated by the story of The Maltese Falcon. Dashiell Hammett wrote about a world filled with greed, suspicion, and betrayal. In searching out the truth about the Maltese falcon, Detective Sam Spade had many opportunities to be greedy and dishonest himself. Yet he never hesitated to do the right thing - even when that meant other people thought he was guilty of wrongdoing. In writing The Maltese Dog, Anne wanted to explore how kids - and dogs - would handle a similar situation." (p 139)

Not surprisingly, given the target readership, the "similar situation" is considerably less violent & treacherous than the one in Hammett's story. I reckon that, from my POV, the underlying ethics are both apolitical & areligious &, as such, perhaps more deeply entrenched in a general human consciousness. At least I hope so. My "it was ok" rating of it has more to do w/ how far I am from the adolescent readership than to the bk's being necessarily 'flawed'. ( )