My Hollywood crime novel Chandler & West: A Story of Los Angeles is now stocked by the San Francisco Public Library. As a San Franciscan, I’m especially proud to know my work is on the shelf of my local library. And if you live here, it’s one more way to pick up the book.
You can request the book from its SFPL catalog page, or visit one of the branches listed to pick it up in person. My prior historical crime book A Man Named Baskerville is also in SFPL’s catalog as well.
Anyone who’s followed this blog knows I’ve written a few times about Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. In particular, I’ve posted notes on an interlude within it about a man named Charles Flitcraft who, after a near-death experience, leaves his family and home to wander the world, only to return to a similar suburban family life a few years later. This episode is commonly called the Flitcraft Parable, for it does indeed read like one, even if the term is never used in The Maltese Falcon itself.
Detective Sam Spade tells this brief tale to Brigid O’Shaughnessy, the book’s femme fatale. The reason for the telling is a common question about the parable, since it seems out-of-place in this taut and lean novel. I’ve also explored how the parable plays into the book’s final scene, when Spade lays out his credo for O’Shaughnessy.
Recently, I was rereading the Flitcraft Parable for a project I’m developing, when I noticed something surprising in it: It’s the one place in the book where Hammett’s voice comes through, almost directly.
In the book, Sam Spade tells of Flitcraft, a well-to-do banker with a house, a car, and a family. One day, on his way to lunch, he strolls by a construction site:
A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn’t touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. … He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.
Shaken to the core, and realizing he’d been spared by cosmic fate, Flitcraft abandons his family and wealth, and flees for life on the road. Years later, he winds up in another suburban town, remarried and with a new child, living a life near-identical to the one he fled. “He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”
It’s important here to mention that The Maltese Falcon is told in the third-person objective, a perspective rarely used in fiction. It’s a significant choice on Hammett’s part.
Most modern third-person fiction is told as third-person limited, where the narrator describes the main character’s thoughts and feelings. In third-person objective, the narrator never reveals any character’s internal thoughts. The only clues for the reader are external details and reactions, such as facial expressions. Merriam-Webster defines third-person objective as:
…the narrator reports the events that take place without knowing the motivations or thoughts of any of the characters. We know little about what drives them until we hear them speak or observe their actions. The resulting tone is often matter-of-fact, not colored by any opinions or commentary, nor of knowledge of what takes place outside the scene.
It’s an extremely difficult point-of-view to pull off, especially for novel-length work. It’s the kind of restrictive perspective creative writing instructors warn their students to avoid.
Hammett does pull off third-person objective in The Maltese Falcon though, and he does it so well, most readers don’t even notice it.
So, it’s notable when Hammett’s own voice breaks through the narrative during the Flitcraft Parable, like God calling down from the heavens:
Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man who was most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that. The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.
To be clear, I’m not saying Hammett has broken the rules of third-person objective here. Yet I can’t help but read the above as something more than “matter-of-fact, not colored by any opinions or commentary, now of knowledge of what takes place outside the scene.”
Rereading the above quote carefully, sentence by sentence, it seems less like a summary offered by Spade to O’Shaughnessy, and more like Hammett inserting himself into the book. He offers, in essence, a summary near to the moral or meaning of the parable, much as Jesus asks at the end of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, “Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?”
Hammett’s daughter, Jo, remembers her father telling the Flitcraft Parable to her years after The Maltese Falcon‘s publication “as a story he had just heard or read, not as if he had used it as a set-piece in a book.” Apparently, he liked to tell the story to others as well. It seems the parable of a comfortable man shocked into a realization of life’s fragility struck Hammett deeply. That’s why I think he took a chance to include it in The Maltese Falcon, and took an even greater chance to explain to the reader, in his own voice, what the parable signifies.
Back in April of this year, I learned of the “Commission Vault Mini Museum” via SFGate.com, the online arm of the San Francisco Chronicle. I immediately booked a reservation to tour the museum, which is so backlogged, it takes month to get in. I only visited on July 9th, three months later.
The Commission in question the San Francisco Park Commission, which governs the city’s Recreation and Parks Department. The museum houses photographs and artifacts from the department’s century and a half tenure, which extends back to 1871.
This must be one of the smallest museums on the West Coast—it’s housed inside a walk-in vault. The floor dimensions are perhaps twelve feet by four feet. It’s so compact only four or five people can comfortably stand in it at once. You begin to understand why open reservations are months out.
For me, the tour began when I entered the Commission’s headquarters, located at the eastern entrance to Golden Gate Park, inside McLaren Lodge. It was built in the late 19th century for John McLaren, the most famous and prominent superintendent of San Francisco’s Parks Department. The lodge not only served as offices for his staff, but was also home for him, his family, and personal staff. It was as though all 1,017 acres of Golden Gate Park was his personal backyard.
It’s a grand structure, with rustic stone exterior and rough columns and arches, topped with red clay roof tiles. Historian-in-residence Christopher Pollock told me it’s often described as a mixture of Mission Revival and Craftsman architecture, although at least one source dubbed it “Scottish Baronial.” It’s a fitting term for horticulturalist McLaren, who immigrated to America from Scotland in his youth, and was known in his later years as bearing a kind but kingly manner.
Either way, McLaren Lodge’s architecture is oddly familiar but strikingly unusual compared to San Francisco’s other architectural styles. It’s the kind of structure a Hollywood millionaire would build in the mountains near Lake Tahoe, or you read about in The Day of the Locust. In that sense, the lodge is uniquely Californian: A style evocative of another place or time, but not of any other time or place.
As a boomtown, early San Francisco had few public green spaces. The thousand-acre Golden Gate Park on the city’s west side was the solution. The first problem to be solved was the land itself. The acreage was barren and covered in windswept sand dunes blown eastward from the Pacific ocean. (No, really—check out some photos for yourself.)
McLaren and his predecessor William Hammond Hall spent decades terraforming this desolate stretch of wasteland into a woodland reserve, with rose gardens, rhododendron dells, groves of sequoias and Monterey cypress, and wide meadows of Kentucky bluegrass. For entertainment, McLaren installed lakes, fishing holes, lawn bowling courts, horse stables, and much more. Golden Gate Park was California’s first Disneyland, a theme park before there were theme parks, showcasing the state’s natural beauty.
McLaren’s decades of devotion to building the greatest city park in the world, and the resulting grandeur, made him one of the most popular public servants in San Francisco history. The city amended its charter in order to appoint him Park Superintendent for life, a post he held for over four decades. The meeting room where the Vault Museum is found features a prominent portrait of McLaren, still overseeing the Commission’s agenda decades after his passing.
The vault holding the museum was where the Commission originally stored cash and valuables, from a time when physical currency was more common for things like park permits and payroll. Later, the vault was cleared out and used for storage, which included several filing cabinets of paperwork. Those papers turned out to be historical documents unto themselves. They’re now stored at the San Francisco Public Library.
With the vault cleared out, the idea came to use it for a display of the Park’s history, which led to the creation of the Mini Museum.
The Museum itself is a picturesque but brief travel through the decades of Golden Gate Park’s long life. Photographs of the early years show the sand dunes that had to be tamed by McLaren and Hall, as well as the cemeteries originally lining the northwestern border of the park. (Those graves would eventually be moved down the peninsula to Colma; some of the broken headstones would wind up lining the pathways and gutters in Buena Vista Park, a few blocks from McLaren Lodge.)
Each decade thereafter depicts the city’s and park’s development, recording the growing population and an increasing number of public parks throughout San Francisco. (One surprise for me: the nondescript Colombia Square, which I gave short shrift to in my “San Francisco streets with confusingly similar names” page, is actually one of the city’s earliest neighborhood parks.) The timeline also shows Golden Gate Park as a civic meeting place and cultural lodestone, such as when it hosted now-legendary rock acts in the late 1960s.
For over a hundred years, San Francisco has been known as a “city of hotels.” It’s also a city of museums and tours, mainstream as well as quirky, cool, odd, and now tiny. It’s hard to call the Commission Vault Mini Museum a must-see for visitors in town for only a few days. I do think it’s worth your while if you love San Francisco history—especially the history of its parks—and can line up a spot for an afternoon viewing. I wasn’t disappointed at all; I’m just unsure if my enthusiasm for Golden Gate Park’s history is widely shared.
Someone on the tour asked if they offered tours of McLaren Lodge itself, which apparently is under consideration. Combining a tour of the vault with a tour of house itself would make an afternoon visit a no-doubter.
Over at itch.io, my cyber-noir “In My Memory Locked” is on sale as part of their big Summer Sale 2026. A buck ninety-nine! What a deal.
Go get it at https://jim-nelson.itch.io/in-my-memory-locked
With apologies to Gwendolyn Brooks.
The shopping mall.
Seven minutes to closing.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Text straight. We
Five bars. We
Tap cards. We
Can’t roam. We
Fix phone.
With the release of a new Netflix adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies comes another round of media reminders that the book’s most famous plot element—shipwrecked children turn barbarously violent—was “disproven” fifty years ago on an island in the South Pacific.
The logic goes something like this:
In 1965, six Tongan teenagers were shipwrecked on ‘Ata, an uninhabited island on the southern tip of the Tonga archipelago. Rather than descend into savagery, as the children do in Lord of the Flies, the Tongans managed to survive and form a communal-like existence. They shared duties, gathered food, kept spirits up, and even tended to one another, such as setting one’s boy’s fractured leg. After fifteen months, they were rescued and returned to their families.
The story of the Tongans has grown into a modern parable warning against taking Golding’s book seriously, or even discarding it outright. One example comes from a recent article, where Lenore Skenazy recounts the Tongan success story with the brisk conclusion, “So much for barbarism.”
The popular linking of the true-life Tongan incident with Golding’s novel appears to have started with Dutch historian Rutger Bregman. His 2019 book Humankind: A Hopeful History sets out to prove that people are fundamentally decent and eager to build a better society. Whatever Golding’s fictional account may depict, he says, real children do not become wild, bloodthirsty creatures once they’re removed from the watchful eyes of civilization.
Bregman followed his book with a 2020 Guardian article headlined “The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months.” The story went viral on social media, leading to years of articles repeating his thesis. A sampling of subsequent headlines shows they even mirrored the Guardian‘s, almost down to the word:
Since the Tongan teenagers didn’t turn against each other, the logic goes, Lord of the Flies has been proven wrong. It’s as if we should discard the lessons of Animal Farm because there exists not one recorded episode of farm animals forming an authoritarian Marxist collective.
As Scott Alexander writes, “Beware the man of one study.” A single example that ends well does not slam the door on Golding’s book, and it’s pretty sad that so many people think it would.
But if one example is proof positive, is a single counterexample dispositive? Consider the Sugamo child abandonment case. In 1988, a mother left her four young children alone in a Tokyo apartment for nine months. No, they weren’t shipwrecked like the Tongans or the Lord of the Flies boys—but that’s kind of the point. The children had modern shelter, clean running water, and easy access to food, which they procured from local convenience stores using money the mother had left for them. The children did a remarkable job of taking care of each other, but it wasn’t enough.
When finally discovered by social workers, they were malnourished, and one of the children was missing. The eldest boy admitted that two of his friends had assaulted and killed the youngest girl. While the eldest boy was not present at the killing, he helped his friends bury her body.
When reports reached the public, the response in Japan mirrored an underlying question posed many times in Lord of the Flies: “How could Japanese children be reduced to this behavior?”
In Lord of the Flies, it’s the English who are puzzled: “I should have thought that a pack of British boys…would have been able to put up a better show than that,” one character remarks at the end of the book. The boys were raised well and taught in boarding schools. Each had a reading diet of British Empire adventure books about self-sufficient boys who always act as proper young gentlemen, even in the face of adversity. “We’re English, and the English are best at everything,” young Jack declares, a statement which turns out to be surprisingly empty by the final chapter. “The northern European tradition of work, play, and food right through the day, made it possible for them to adjust wholly to this new rhythm,” the narrator of Lord of the Files declares, another statement emptied of meaning after only a few pages.
After all, the book most often named the first prose novel in the English language is none other than Robinson Crusoe, a story about a shipwrecked Englishman surviving due to self-discipline, routine, and his education. Crusoe was written for adults, but over the years it developed a younger audience. It also became a model for how every Englishman should act under duress.
It’s not hard to imagine Ralph, Jack, and the others reading Crusoe while in school. Yet Golding’s book feels like a rebuttal to Defoe’s classic, tearing down its colonial-era pride with cool precision.
Contrary to popular depiction, the children in Lord of the Flies don’t immediately descend into barbarism. Upon their arrival on the island, the boys formulate rules, coordinate efforts, and develop routines, just as their boarding school education taught them. They choose a leader in the fair-haired (and fair-minded) Ralph, who sets about in assigning duties. He even leads the boys in building a signal fire atop the island’s sole mountain, exactly as the Tongan boys did.
The Tongans numbered six teenagers, aged 13 to 19. They were friends at a Catholic school. They ran away, gathered food and supplies, and stole a boat. That is, they were working together before they even reached the island.
In contrast, the number of children in the book is not stated with precision, but it’s likely close to twenty or thirty. The children do not know each other, and none are pubescent. The “littleuns” are so numerous that, after the mountaintop fire grows into an inferno, the older children are unsure if one of them perished in the blaze.
Two months after Bregman’s story in the Guardian, Tongan Meleika Gesa penned a rebuttal arguing the boys of ‘Ata were not the “real” Lord of the Flies. Gesa explains how Tongan values and education prepared them for survival. Not only did they know how to start a fire and catch and prepare fish, the Tongan culture instilled a familial cohesion among the group. There’s no such unity among the boys in Lord of the Flies, save for their nationality.
Amusingly, Gesa asks, “How can you be surprised that Pasifika people, specifically Tongan, can survive on an island?”
The Guardian article claims Bregman “unearthed” the forgotten story about Tongan teenagers on an island, like a paleontologist discovering a new fossil. Gesa points out the story of the teens is well known among Tongans, and not forgotten at all.
Gesa has more complaints about the way Bregman presents the story, but the overarching tragedy is that Bregman’s, not Gesa’s, account dominates public perception. “While the boys of ‘Ata have been consigned to obscurity, Golding’s book is still widely read,” Bregman wrote in 2020. That’s not so true today.
In the 1950s, William Golding wrote that Lord of the Flies “is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. … The whole book is symbolic in nature.” (Emphasis mine.)
That Lord of the Flies is a parable constructed with symbolism and metaphor, and not a detailed, realistic account of children on an island, seems incredibly obvious to me—and yet, here we are, with people treating the book as a failed thought experiment.
We all seem to agree that society is defective—otherwise, we wouldn’t spend so much time arguing over politics, policy, and taxes. If society’s defects don’t emerge from defects in human nature, where else would they come from?
I see little evidence in the world that people’s natural instincts are to work together, avoid conflict, and live peaceably side-by-side. If anything, much of our modern existence is spent pushing against those social norms. Modern culture treats every little interaction as a zero-sum transaction, which concludes with one party the winner and the other the loser. Getting people to see humility, cooperation, and teamwork as being non-zero-sum—transactions where everyone wins—seems futile.
But can those social values—work together, avoid conflict—be taught? At one time, they were, via a humanistic education, religion, and active parenting—the same institutions Western culture has been discounting over the past fifty years.
So, have we adopted some system of moral instruction to fill the void? If so, I can’t locate it. What appears to have taken its place is the zero-sum thinking I mentioned above. With it came a kind of raw, undeveloped trust in Realism and Literalism, twin brothers of interpretation which frantically attempt to nail down, rather than open up, our understanding of human nature. By nailing down human nature into a flat and mechanical one, it opens up a self-justifying excuse for zero-sum thinking. Add to that our culture’s simmering anxiety of being taken for a chump, which appears to be one of our deepest fears. Way back when, if someone took advantage of another, the cheater was shamed.
William Golding wrote, “The moral [of Lord of the Flies] is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system.”
Tongan Meleika Gesa wrote during the pandemic, “Just look at how we’re surviving Covid-19 together. My family have given away food to our neighbours and checked up on friends and family because that’s how we survive.”
Jack in Lord of the Flies says, “We’re English, and the English are best at everything.”
That’s the ethical and moral divide between the Tongan teens and the boys in Lord of the Flies. What follows for each group flows from within.
A Goodreads giveaway for fifty Kindle editions of Chandler & West has started.
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The giveaway ends May 19th, when the winners are announced.
