I have spent the weekend jumping between Joe Gores's Spade and Archer: The Prequel to The Maltese Falcon and Judd Winick's Batman: Under the Hood.
Gores's is an interesting literary exercise. A Hammett scholar and an accomplished short story writer, Gores knows enough of Sam Spade's world to be able to recreate it. The novel, though, lacks the sharp hard edges of Hammett's narrative.
Sam Spade and Old School Detectives
Spade and Archer is less of a novel than a collection of short stories, recounting a series of cases filling the time between Sam leaving Continental Detective Agency and the arrival of Brigid, bringing news of the falcon.
Spade and Archer is less of a novel than a collection of short stories, recounting a series of cases filling the time between Sam leaving Continental Detective Agency and the arrival of Brigid, bringing news of the falcon.
Gores's is an interesting literary exercise. A Hammett scholar and an accomplished short story writer, Gores knows enough of Sam Spade's world to be able to recreate it. The novel, though, lacks the sharp hard edges of Hammett's narrative.
Reading it, I keep thinking back to Dark Horse's Star Wars series--Knights of the Old Republic and Legacies. All seem to lack the freshness, vividness of the originals--they are more of the same.
Batman and Epic Heroes
The same cannot be said, though, of Judd Winick's return to a different detective from the same time period. I have started volume two of Batman: Under the Hood, and I am captivated. Winick's writing is a wonderful mix of comic book violence and epic storytelling. (And the artistry keeps pace.) 
One theorist holds that epics are too large, expansive, to fall into the tragic. If so, Winick has captured the voice of the epic bard, scop, and rawi. The Batman of Winick's world is surrounded by the potentially tragic; he is harried by hamartia; the cosmos has it out for him. But Batman's story, his world, and his character are all too too...to be taken down into the abyss of a catastrophe.
Winick's Batman follows in the footsteps of Ferdowsi's Rostam. Both are fathers who falter ever so briefly as they inadvertently destroy what they cherish. Neither is pulled down by their uncertainties; if anything, they are galvanized by the job that awaits. They have resolve.
Like San Jara, Odysseus, and Arthur, Batman is only fictional in the most trivial of ways. All of these champions are reflections of an ideal that the culture can hold out before itself--promising and threatening, "This is what awaits those who trifle."
Recommendation (for the few of you who may not have read Under the Hood)
Set aside time for the Bat--and you will be able to brag about having spent the weekend polishing off an epic.
Bayard
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