Miles Archer is murdered

Miles Archer is murdered while working the case assigned to Spade & Archer by Brigid O’Shaughnessy. His death begins as a scene reconstructed from a fallen body, a broken fence, and a distinctive revolver; later disclosures connect the shooting to the rival group seeking the Maltese Falcon and establish that Thursby’s death was intended to isolate Brigid from her ally.

Discovery and Physical Evidence

Sam Spade arrives at an alley where an ambulance is waiting. A ten-foot section of the fence’s top rail has been torn loose, and Archer lies on his back in a notch between a slope and a boulder fifteen feet below it. Men with lights are searching the slope. Tom Polhaus, who has come up from the scene, tells Spade that Archer was shot with a Webley revolver and shows him the mud-marked weapon.

Spade identifies it as a Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver, a .38-caliber, eight-shot model no longer being made. Only one round has been fired. Without touching the gun, he reconstructs a possible sequence: Archer was shot beside the fence, fell backward through its top rail, and continued down the slope until the boulder stopped him. Polhaus agrees with the reconstruction and says the gunshot had burned Archer’s coat. The scene offers a strong account of how Archer’s body came to rest below the alley, though the physical arrangement alone does not establish who fired.

The Assignment and the Murder Investigation

Spade explains that Archer was supposed to be following Floyd Thursby. The assignment began with Brigid’s account: she said she had met Thursby in the Orient and had come with him from Hong Kong the previous week. She described herself as dependent on him and said he had betrayed her after promising to help. Her explanation gives Archer’s surveillance a place in the case, but at this point she does not explain what the betrayal involved.

The murder inquiry later produces evidence implicating Thursby’s revolver. Polhaus says that the slug recovered from Archer came from the same Webley, and that a bellhop at Thursby’s hotel had seen the weapon in his room that morning. The detective treats the identification as conclusive. The evidence links Thursby’s gun to the fatal shot, while Spade’s earlier reconstruction concerns the shooter’s position and Archer’s fall; these are related but distinct parts of the investigation.

The chronology of Archer’s widow, Iva Archer, also enters the inquiry. Sid Wise reports that she said she first drove to Spade’s place between half past nine and ten, returned around ten-thirty when he was still out, and then went to a Powell Street movie because she did not want to be home when Archer arrived. She said she stayed until the theater closed, ate at Tait’s on Ellis Street, and went home alone. Her account becomes one strand of the investigation’s timeline rather than a resolution of the murder by itself.

The Falcon Plot Behind the Shooting

A later explanation from Casper Gutman places Thursby’s killing within the struggle over the Falcon. Gutman says that Thursby was Brigid’s ally and a notorious killer, and that his removal was meant to leave her without a violent protector and encourage her to reconcile with Gutman’s group. Gutman says they did not believe Thursby possessed the Falcon. They knew Brigid too well to think he was the one who knew its whereabouts, although they did not then know that she had entrusted it to Captain Jacobi in Hong Kong for transport aboard the La Paloma while she and Thursby took a faster boat.

Gutman also describes an unsuccessful attempt to recruit Thursby before he was killed. Wilmer Cook had located him two days earlier and tried to follow him to Brigid, but Thursby avoided being tracked. On the night of Archer’s murder, Wilmer waited outside Thursby’s hotel and brought him to Gutman after finding him absent. Gutman says Thursby refused to cooperate because of his loyalty to Brigid. Wilmer then followed him back to the hotel and killed him. This account makes the two killings part of the same contest, but it does not establish that Thursby fired the shot that killed Archer.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

Archer’s death turns the falcon investigation into a murder case and leaves Spade answerable for the death of his partner. The clues at the alley initially point toward a specific weapon and a plausible sequence of movement; subsequent testimony connects that weapon with Thursby, while Gutman’s account supplies a separate motive for Thursby’s own murder. Together, these revelations widen the case from a single killing into a chain of surveillance, alliance, failed negotiation, and violence surrounding the Falcon.

The episode’s structure preserves a distinction between what can be observed and what characters later claim to know. Archer’s position, the damaged fence, and the fired Webley are details of the scene; the identification of Thursby’s gun comes through Polhaus’s report of the ballistic evidence and the bellhop’s observation; the broader conspiracy comes through Gutman’s retrospective account. Archer’s murder therefore remains both a concrete crime investigated through physical evidence and the event that draws Spade deeper into a struggle whose participants have competing, incomplete knowledge.