The Maltese Falcon (novel)

The Maltese Falcon

Cover of the first edition
Author	Dashiell Hammett
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Detective
Published	1929 (Alfred A. Knopf)
Media type	Print (hardcover)
Preceded by	The Dain Curse
Followed by	The Glass Key

The Maltese Falcon is a 1929 detective novel by Dashiell Hammett, originally serialized in the magazine Black Mask beginning with the September 1929 issue. The story has been adapted several times for the cinema. The main character, Sam Spade, appears in this novel and in three lesser-known short stories and is widely cited as the crystallizing figure in the development of the hard-boiled private detective genre. Raymond Chandler's character Philip Marlowe, for instance, was strongly influenced by Hammett's Spade. Spade was a departure from Hammett's nameless detective, The Continental Op. Spade combined several features of previous detectives, notably his cold detachment, keen eye for detail, unflinching, sometimes ruthless, determination to achieve his own form of justice, and a complete lack of sentimentality.

The novel contains a considerable amount of homosexual subtext concerning Wilmer Cook and Joel Cairo (Cairo is also referred to as the "Levantine"), all of which was excised, because of Production Code restraints, from the 1941 film version starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor, the best known of three films between 1931 and 1941 adapted from Hammett's novel. The briefly seen character Rhea Gutman, who has no back story, does not appear in any of the film versions. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked The Maltese Falcon 56th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

Note: the story is told entirely in external third-person narrative; there is no description whatever of any character's internal thoughts or feelings, only what they say and do, and how they look.

In 1928, Samuel "Sam" Spade is a private detective in San Francisco, in partnership with Miles Archer. A beautiful young woman, "Miss Wonderly", hires them to follow Floyd Thursby, and find her sister, who ran off with him. Archer takes the first stint. That night, Archer is found shot to death. A few hours later, Thursby is also killed and Spade is a suspect. Spade refuses to tell the police about the client. The next morning, Spade coolly tells his office secretary, Effie Perine, to have the office door repainted to read simply "Samuel Spade". "Miss Wonderly" is soon revealed as adventuress Brigid O'Shaughnessy, involved with the title object, a foot-high black statuette of unknown but substantial value. Others are after the falcon, including Joel Cairo, an effeminate Greek homosexual, and Casper Gutman, a fat man accompanied by vicious young gunman Wilmer Cook.