1927

1927 is the year Sam Spade recalls locating Charles Pierce Flitcraft in Spokane, five years after a falling beam nearly killed him and prompted him to abandon his former life. Told while Spade waits for Joel Cairo to arrive, the recollection makes an apparently orderly chronology open onto a deeper question: whether adapting to a changed life means understanding what happened, or simply finding another pattern to inhabit.

The Spokane encounter

Spade dates the search by setting it against an earlier point: in 1922, he had been told that somebody resembling Flitcraft had been seen in Spokane. By 1927, Spade was working for one of the large detective agencies in Seattle. Flitcraft’s first wife came to the agency with the report, and Spade went to Spokane to investigate. He found that the man was indeed Flitcraft, living under his first and middle names, Charles Pierce.

The life Spade found was not a makeshift hiding place. Flitcraft had spent a couple of years in Spokane, built an automobile business netting twenty or twenty-five thousand dollars a year, married again, had a baby son, and owned a home in a suburb. In the season, he ordinarily left work after four to play golf. The solid particulars make his disappearance less like a continuing flight than a successful re-entry into conventional routine.

A past without an accusation

Spade had received no definite instructions about what to do after finding Flitcraft. The two men talked in Spade’s room at the Davenport. Flitcraft felt no guilt: he had left his first family well provided for, and considered his actions reasonable. His difficulty was not that he could not account for himself, but that he doubted he could make his reasoning clear to Spade. He had never before told anyone the story, and had never needed to put its logic into words.

The first family’s response did not resolve the moral disagreement so much as contain it. Spade says that Flitcraft’s first wife thought the explanation silly. She wanted no scandal and, viewing his departure as a trick played on her, did not want him back. They divorced quietly, and, as Spade puts it, everything came out well for all concerned. The contrast between Flitcraft’s confidence in his reason and his wife’s refusal to share it remains intact beneath that tidy outcome.

The falling beam

The change began during an ordinary walk to lunch. A beam, or something like one, dropped eight or ten stories from an unfinished office building and struck the sidewalk beside Flitcraft. It missed him, but chipped the paving; a fragment flew up and cut his cheek. When Spade later saw him, the scar was still there. Recalling the accident, Flitcraft rubbed it with his finger, almost affectionately.

He had been badly scared, but, by his account, more shocked than frightened. The near miss made him feel that life’s cover had been lifted and its workings exposed. A man could be erased between office and restaurant by a falling beam; people died haphazardly and lived only while blind chance spared them. The accident did not reveal a hidden order. It revealed the fragility beneath the orderly life Flitcraft had taken for granted.

Adjustment and narrative significance

Before the accident, Flitcraft had been a good citizen, husband, and father—not because an outside force compelled him, but because he was most comfortable moving in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way, and the people he knew shared that orderly, responsible view of life. The falling beam unsettled that arrangement: what had looked sane and dependable could be interrupted by chance without warning.

Spade presents Flitcraft’s later life as an answer made through adaptation rather than explanation. Flitcraft left his first family, established himself elsewhere, and again acquired the routines and responsibilities of a settled man. The new Spokane household does not undo the old one, and the quiet divorce does not show that the two former spouses understood the event alike. Instead, the account turns on successive accommodation: after the world failed to behave as Flitcraft expected, he made a different life in which he could again live comfortably.

The timing gives the anecdote a structural role in the surrounding conversation. Spade begins telling it after calling Cairo and telling Brigid O’Shaughnessy that Cairo will come to see her; the story temporarily diverts attention from the immediate meeting into a remembered search. When Spade returns to the present plot, Cairo is excitedly reporting that the young man Spade had shown him outside the theatre is watching the house. The tale of Flitcraft therefore sits between one disclosure and a fresh sign of surveillance, broadening the novel’s account of adaptation without settling Brigid’s concealed history or the danger surrounding the falcon.