The Maltese Falcon

Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, first published in 1930, is one of the greatest crime novels of all times, inspiring numerous spinoffs in film, television, and theater.

The hero, Sam Spade, is a hard-bitten and ethically ambiguous detective who is approached by the beautiful and mysterious Miss Wonderly to track down her missing sister. Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, steps in, only to be shot that very night. Spade’s honor as a detective requires him to track down Archer’s killer.

Spade’s journey takes him through San Francisco of the 1920s-dark, foggy, and sinister, in one of the city’s many moods. Spade knows that Miss Wonderly is not who she claims to be. Unraveling this mystery, he encounters Joel Cairo, an effeminate Greek antiquities dealer; Casper Gutman, a fat man in search of a priceless figurine of a black falcon; and Wilmer, a brutal young gunslinger.

The Maltese Falcon has captured the public imagination through the famous 1941 film starring Humphrey Bogart. But the novel itself is a masterpiece of mystery fiction—and of the lean, hard-boiled prose style that came to characterize the American detective novel. It remains as compelling as it was the day it was published.

Born in 1894 to a working-class family in Maryland, Dashiell Hammett drifted through odd jobs before taking a job at the Pinkerton Detective Agency, where he learned the ins and outs of detective work that would furnish the material for his crime novels. Between 1929 and 1934, he published five of these—the most famous being The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man (itself the inspiration of several Hollywood films).

In later years, Hammett’s abilities waned, affected by alcohol, smoking, and tuberculosis. In the 1950s, his leftist politics would put him at odds with the House Un-American Activities Committee. He died in 1961.

But Hammett’s stark, unsentimental complexity continues to influence crime fiction to this very day. He was the first and most influential creator of the tough but charismatic detective that continues to fascinate the world’s readers nearly a century later.