Sam Spade is cool and cynical and dangerous, taking it as a matter of course when he's lied to and double-crossed, never getting upset when people point guns at him, but erupting into a violent temper at tactically appropriate moments. Hammett doesn't lay clues per se, though the reader might guess some of what's really going on before it's revealed (even without the advantage of this story having been part of the pop-culture zeitgeist for eighty years). Unlike a lot of other crime fiction, The Maltese Falcon doesn't have a "moral," and the "mystery" isn't really a puzzle for the reader to solve. The defining characteristics of "hard-boiled" detective stories are tough, cocky heroes in a gritty, unsentimental world.
The only flaw I found in his writing was a few too many mentions of Sam Spade's "yellow-gray eyes." Everything is conveyed by action and dialog. He doesn't go into anyone's head, even that of the main character. Which is to stay, he tells a linear, concise story with just enough description to paint a clear picture, but with everything else pared away. But read it anyway: Dashiell Hammett writes like a whittler carving a stick into. Even if you haven't seen the movie, you'll still probably see the twists coming a mile away because you know the plot through cultural osmosis. This is one of those books that suffers from having been so often imitated.
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So begins The Maltese Falcon, which is full of sex and violence (neither being graphic or explicit, but definitely there) and femme fatales and scheming and double-crosses and cool one-liners. Soon after this, Thursby himself turns up dead, and Spade becomes a suspect. While tailing Thursby, Miles Archer is shot. A beautiful damsel in distress named Miss Wonderly hires them to find her little sister, who has supposedly run off to San Francisco in the company of a very dangerous man named Floyd Thursby.
Sam Spade and his partner Miles Archer are private investigators in San Francisco. These are the ingredients of Dashiell Hammett's cooly glittering gem of detective fiction, a novel that has haunted three generations of readers. A perfumed grifter named Joel Cairo, a fat man named Gutman, and Brigid O'Shaughnessy, a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime.
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Sam Spade, a slightly shopworn private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. Inverarity One-line summary: The classic hard-boiled detective tale: Sam Spade works the streets of San Francisco on a hunt for a priceless artifact and the murderer who killed his partner.Ī treasure worth killing for.
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