The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett (1930)
“Everyone in this room is lying. The detective knows it. He doesn't care — until they kill his partner.”
At a Glance
San Francisco private detective Sam Spade is hired by the mysterious Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and his partner Miles Archer is killed the first night on the job. The case spirals into a hunt for a jewel-encrusted statuette — the Maltese Falcon — with Spade caught between a cast of elegant criminals, a murderous fat man, and his own moral code. At the end, the falcon is a fake and Spade hands the woman he loves to the police for his partner's murder.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
The Maltese Falcon essentially invented the modern hard-boiled detective novel and created the template for the noir genre. Sam Spade is the prototype of every wisecracking, morally ambiguous detective in American popular culture — Philip Marlowe, Jake Gittes, every version since. The 1941 John Huston film adaptation (the third attempt) is considered one of the greatest American films ever made. Humphrey Bogart's Spade became the definitive icon of the genre.
Diction Profile
Deliberately low — American vernacular, stripped of ornament, with occasional formal passages for characters performing education (Gutman, Cairo)
Very low