Sam spade, the detective in “The Maltese Falcon”, a crime novel by Dashiell Hammett, recounts a story of a missing-person case. Flitcraft, an everyman, is nearly killed by a falling beam. Confronted with the randomness of life, he decides—randomly—to vanish. After drifting for years, he settles into a new life much like his old one: marriage, kids, and golf at four. “He adjusted himself to beams falling,” says Spade. “And when no more of them fell, he adjusted himself to them not falling.”