A Gentleman in Moscow

by Amor Towles

In the minutes that followed, once again the services of Sam Spade were enlisted by the alluring, if somewhat mysterious, Miss Wonderly. Once again, Spade’s partner was gunned down in an alley just hours before Floyd Thursby met a similar fate. And once again Joel Cairo, the Fat Man, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, having surreptitiously joined forces, drugged Spade’s whiskey and headed for the wharf, their elusive quest finally within reach. But even as Spade was nursing his head, a stranger in a black coat and hat stumbled into his office, dropped a bundle to the floor, and collapsed dead on the couch!

Casablanca When I was in my early teens, there was a movie theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts which would show a different double feature every day. One day it would be two Marx Brothers movies, then two James Bonds, then two westerns, or two Hitchcocks, or two Audrey Hepburn films. For a period of years, I would often go there with my father to see one or both of the films, then we would eat knockwurst and red cabbage at a German restaurant around the corner called the Wurst Haus (long since gone). But out of all the double features, my father was particularly fond of the Bogart days when you could see some pairing of The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, To Have and to Have Not, Dark Passage, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Casablanca. My father admired Bogart so much, that we had a large black and white framed poster of him at a café table hanging in our house. One of the biggest benefits of being a novelist is that you get to incorporate into your books various things that you like. (And why wouldn’t you?!) So, when I had the notion that Osip and the Count would study the West by watching and analyzing American films together, I immediately leapt to the films of Bogart as Osip’s favored course of study. In early drafts of the book, the most important film they watched together was The Maltese Falcon. Pages and pages were written in which they discussed the meanings of the film. But the pages simply weren’t working. Then like a flash, I realized that the movie they should be focused on was Casablanca. Of course, it was! For like the Metropol in the Soviet era, Rick’s café was an oasis in the middle in which an international crowd gathered to drink, listen to music, and forget their troubles. What’s more, in Casablanca Rick wears a white dinner jacket, just like the Count does when he’s waiting tables at the Boyarsky. As soon as I had the idea of shifting to Casablanca, I saw the potential for the critical role the movie might play in the book’s concluding pages…