Spokane

Spokane is the city where Charles Pierce Flitcraft settled after abruptly leaving his first family and spending a couple of years wandering. His life there gives a concrete ending to Sam Spade’s story about the falling beam: Flitcraft escaped an orderly existence in response to chance, then built another orderly existence in much the same way.

Flitcraft’s Return to the Northwest

After leaving Tacoma, Flitcraft went to Seattle and traveled by boat to San Francisco. He wandered for a couple of years before drifting back to the Northwest and settling in Spokane. There he married again, had a baby son, owned a home in a suburb, and ran an automobile business that earned twenty or twenty-five thousand dollars a year. His regular life even had its familiar leisure: during the season, he usually got away to play golf after four in the afternoon.

Spade encountered him there in 1927, after Flitcraft’s first wife reported that someone had seen a man in Spokane who looked like her missing husband. Spade went to investigate and found that the resemblance was exact: the man was Flitcraft, living under his first names, Charles Pierce. The prosperous household Spade found was not a return to the original family; Flitcraft had established a second marriage and a new home.

The City as the End of an Escape

Spokane is the destination of a journey that began with an accident in Tacoma. A falling beam narrowly missed Flitcraft as he passed a building site; a piece of chipped sidewalk struck his cheek and left a scar. The near miss unsettled him because it exposed how randomly a life could end, despite his being a responsible citizen, husband, and father. He decided to answer that randomness by leaving, first going to Seattle, then San Francisco, and eventually back to the Northwest.

His settlement in Spokane reveals the limit of that break. Flitcraft’s second wife did not look like his first, but, as Spade observed, the two were more alike than different: both belonged to the same recognizable world of fair golf games, bridge, and new salad recipes. In Spokane, Flitcraft had not recreated his first household exactly, but he had settled into a similar social and domestic groove.

Narrative Significance

Spokane serves as the destination that makes Flitcraft’s story more than an account of flight. The accident prompted him to reject the assumption that life was naturally orderly; leaving home was his chosen adjustment to the prospect of arbitrary death. Yet his later prosperity, remarriage, suburban home, and golf routine show that escape did not permanently remove him from familiar patterns. As Spade puts it, Flitcraft adjusted first to beams falling and then to their not falling. Spokane embodies that second adjustment: not a resolution of life’s randomness, but a return to ordinary arrangements after the shock has passed.