In both novels, a fabulous fortune-jewels in “The Falcon,” inherited millions in “The Dove”-shapes the destinies of the disenchanted central characters James’s designing woman Kate Croy, like Hammett’s pistol-packing babe Brigid O’Shaughnessy, loses her lover, although James’s Renunciation Scene is managed, as who should say, rather more exquisitely than Hammett’s, in which Sam Spade speaks these sweetly sorrowful parting words: “You angel! Well, if you get a good break you’ll be out of San Quentin in twenty years and you can come back to me then.” Whereupon he turns her over to the cops for the murder of his partner, Miles Archer (a good old Henry James name, that). I was unable, in a recent reinvestigation, to find many feathers of “The Dove” in the claws of “The Falcon,” but there are a few “faint, far” (as James used to say) resemblances. One night nearly thirty years ago, in a legendary New York boîte de nuit et des arts called Tony’s, I was taking part in a running literary gun fight that had begun with a derogatory or complimentary remark somebody made about something, when one of the participants, former Pinkerton man Dashiell Hammett, whose “The Maltese Falcon” had come out a couple of years before, suddenly startled us all by announcing that his writing had been influenced by Henry James’s novel “The Wings of the Dove.” Nothing surprises me any more, but I couldn’t have been more surprised then if Humphrey Bogart, another frequenter of that old salon of wassail and debate, had proclaimed that his acting bore the deep impress of the histrionic art of Maude Adams.

The Wings of the Dove by Henry James