The Maltese Falcon
- Written By Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon
- Dashiell Hammett
$19.99
Maltese Falcon
When Sam Spade’s partner is gunned down on a foggy San Francisco night, the case seems routine enough. That is, until a beautiful client with a false name and an ever-shifting story draws Spade into a hunt for a small black statuette that men will lie, steal, and kill to possess. Around that prize gather some of the most memorable rogues in crime fiction: the oily Joel Cairo, the cheerful yet monstrous Casper Gutman, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, whose every word Spade must sift through for an ounce of truth.
Cold, cynical, and answerable to no one, Sam Spade became the model for the modern private eye, and the novel that carries him has shaped the genre ever since. Published in 1930, The Maltese Falcon showed a generation of writers how harsh, gritty prose could carry heavy moral weight.
More than ninety years on, Hammett’s masterpiece remains the standard against which detective fiction is measured. A tale of greed and betrayal told at the pace of a quick draw. Journey into the book that taught the world what a hard-boiled thriller could be, now reprinted for a new generation of readers.
About the Author
- Dashiell Hammett
Dashiell Hammett was born in 1894 in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, and left school at thirteen for a string of odd jobs before finding the work that would shape his future career as an author: he became an operative for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. The years he spent shadowing suspects and working real crime cases gave his writing a hard authenticity that set it apart from the genteel puzzle-mysteries of his day.
After serving in the First World War, where he contracted the tuberculosis that would trouble him for the rest of his life, Hammett turned to writing for the pulp magazines. His stories for Black Mask introduced a new kind of crime fiction—lean, unsentimental, and grounded in the language of the street. Over a remarkable six-year burst, he produced five novels—Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse (1929), The Maltese Falcon (1930), The Glass Key (1931), and The Thin Man (1934). Despite the roaring success, he abruptly ended his career as a novelist after The Thin Man; the most popular theory holds that illness combined with writer’s fatigue was the culprit.
Hammett’s later years were marked by left-wing activism, a celebrated partnership with playwright Lillian Hellman, service in the Second World War, and a jail term for refusing to cooperate with a government investigation during the McCarthy Red Scare era.
The 1950s saw the decline of the great veteran, who became a “hermit” (as described by Hellman) and fell deeper into sickness. It is believed he attempted to become a novelist again after the discovery of the unfinished novel Tulip in his home, but it was never meant to be. He died in Manhattan in 1961 of lung cancer. He was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery, widely regarded as the father of the hard-boiled detective novel.
Dodgson was also a gifted photographer, an inveterate deviser of puzzles and word games, and a natural entertainer of children. On a river outing in 1862, he improvised a story for the young daughters of the Christ Church dean, one of whom, Alice Liddell, asked him to write it down. The result, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, appeared in 1865 to immediate acclaim. Its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, followed in 1871.
Alongside the Alice books, Carroll produced the nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark (1876) and the “lesser” novel Sylvie and Bruno (1895). He never married and lived quietly at Oxford until his death in 1898 from pneumonia. His two children’s books have since been translated into more than 170 languages and have never once gone out of print.
