The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

The ultimate hard-boiled detective novel, The Maltese Falcon and its subsequent screen versions (most famously with Humphry Bogart) brought the tough, morally ambiguous, chain smoking and hard-drinking PI into the public consciousness.

Sam Spade is a small time private investigator in San Fancisco who is asked by the beautiful Brigid O’Shaughnessy to track down her errant sister. He sends his partner Miles out on the job, but that night the other man is shot dead and it quickly transpires that their commission wasn’t what it seemed. Called out by the police when they find Miles’s body, it’s well into the small hours when he gets back to his apartment:

Spade’s tinny alarm-lock said three-forty when he turned on the light in the suspended bowl again. He dropped his hat and overcoat on the bed and went into his kitchen, returning to the bedroom with a wine-glass and a tall bottle of Bacardi. He poured a drink and drank it standing. He put bottle and glass on the table, sat on the side of the bed facing them, and rolled a cigarette. He had drunk his third glass of Bacardi and was lighting his fifth cigarette when the street-door-bell rang. The hands of the alarm clock registered four-thirty.

The visitors are the police again, this time trying to insinuate that Spade has something to do with Miles’s murder. The next day, he’s visited by a sinister Levantine by the name of Joel Cairo who asks him if he knows the whereabouts of a black metal figurine in the form of a falcon, then pulls a gun on him... A drink is required after this sort of intrusion:

For half an hour after Joel Cairo had gone Spade sat alone, still and frowning, at his desk. The he said aloud in tone of one dismissing a problem, “Well, they’re paying me for it,” and took a bottle of Manhattan cocktail and a paper drinking-cup from the desk-drawer. He filled the cup two-thirds full, drank, returned the bottle to the drawer, tossed the cup into the wastebasket, put on his hat and overcoat, turned off the lights, and went down to the night-lit street.

Spade finally gets to see the man behind the mystery, the obese Mr. Gutman who tells him the story of the Maltese Falcon, a fabulously valuable jeweled statuette that has been painted black to hide its value. Not before pouring him a Johnny Walker and soda, of course:

Spade sat in the green chair. The fat man began to fill two glasses from bottle and siphon. The boy had disappeared. Doors set in three of the room’s walls were shut. The fourth wall, behind Spade, was pierced by two windows looking out over Geary Street. “We start well, sir,” the fat man purred, turning with a proffered glass in his hand. “I distrust a man that says when. If he’s got to be careful not to drink too much it’s because he’s not to be trusted when he does.”

Sage advice. That said, none of the people Spade has met are to be trusted at all, drink or no drink. What follows is a masterpiece of suspense and two-fisted action and one of the best crime novels ever written.

Johnny Come Home by Jake Arnott

There’s a lazy train of thought that has reduced the 1970s simply to a decade that ‘taste forgot’, nothing more than a parade of kitsch, regurgitated on ‘I love the 70s shows’ with their fixation on Marc Bolan and the Bay City Rollers. Jake Arnott’s novel shifts the focus back from the fluff to radicalised politics, social deprivation and the vacuous heart behind the glam of the music scene.

Sweet Thing is a teenage hustler, a seventeen-year-old rent boy, plying his trade at Piccadilly Circus. His best punter is Johnny Chrome, a has been pop star who somehow flukes a number one hit. With a follow-up single demanded by the record company, Chrome falls apart under the pressure, washed out on tranquilisers and white wine:

“I’m ridiculous, ain’t I?” Sweet Thing didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to upset Johnny. He was a good customer, he reckoned. Johnny shakily poured himself another glass of wine and fumbled for his pills. Time to go, thought Sweet Thing.

Sweet Thing falls in with Pearson and his flat-mate Nina who live in a Somers Town squat off the Euston Road. Pearson’s lover has recently committed suicide, but what he doesn’t know is that he was also involved with the Angry Brigade’s bombing campaign. Sweet Thing’s arrival drives the fragile household apart: Pearson is smitten by the androgynous rent-boy and Nina seduces him. Oblivious to the chaos he is causing, Sweet Thing flits back to Johnny Chrome, now dependent on the boy to give him the courage to perform.

When they got back to Johnny Chrome’s house they sat and watched Top of the Pops. Johnny opened a bottle of white wine and poured them both a glass. He took the pills from his pocket and swallowed two of them. “What are they?” Sweet thing asked. “Downers,” replied Johnny. “Want some?” “Yeah, all right.” Johnny handed the boy a couple and Sweet Thing chased them down with the sweet wine. T. Rex was number one with ‘Metal Guru’.

As Sweet Thing starts to realise how much he has been exploited he hits the town with a pocket full of cash. Wired up on speed, he picks up a punter called Walter, a former male prostitute himself, who warns him that he is a lost soul:

Walter went to get a bottle of brandy and two tumblers. “Make yourself comfortable,” he implored. Sweet Thing slumped on to a sofa. Walther handed him a glass and poured out a couple of inches of spirit. He sat down next to him, one hand holding his own glass, the other snaking around the upholstery to rest on the nape of the boy’s neck. Sweet Thing’s shoulders spasmed. The man patted him gently. Sweet Thing leaned forward and took a gulp of brandy. “Are you OK?” asked Walter. Sweet Thing swallowed and sighed, breathing the spirit’s vapours. Another gob of speed-phlegm trickled down his throat. He felt the brandy glow inside him, his face blushing with its infusion.

Disorientated, he goes back to the squat. Pearson and Nina invite him along to a fund-raiser for the Stoke Newington Eight. Sweet Thing gets pissed on Bacardi and Coke:

“It’s Sweet Thing. He’s drunk. We better take him home.” They found him propped up at the bar. “Fucking hippies!” he was calling out... They hailed a cab and bundled him in. When they got back to the squat they pulled him out and steadied him up the stairs. They got him into his room and lowered him onto the bed. He looked up at them and grinned. The ceiling began to spin above his head.

The hangover is going to last a while. As Johnny Chrome’s Faustian pact with Sweet Thing lurches to its terrible conclusion, Pearson plans one last spectacle in the name of the Angry Brigade. Like the decade itself, the results are explosive...