Book and Movie Review: The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett

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.



Published in 1930

A treasure worth killing for. Sam Spade, a slightly shopworn private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. 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. These are the ingredients of Dashiell Hammett's cooly glittering gem of detective fiction, a novel that has haunted three generations of readers.

( Hard-Boiled is the granddaddy of Grimdark )

Verdict: A classic that deserves its place, though unless you're a devoted hard-boiled fan, there's not much to excite the modern reader aside from Hammett's prose and plotting, which is very good and an excellent example of how to structure a novel. The book is better than the movie, but see the movie(s) too for an education in cinematography and literature both.

Book and Movie Review: The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett

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.



Published in 1930

A treasure worth killing for. Sam Spade, a slightly shopworn private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. 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. These are the ingredients of Dashiell Hammett's cooly glittering gem of detective fiction, a novel that has haunted three generations of readers.

( Hard-Boiled is the granddaddy of Grimdark )

Verdict: A classic that deserves its place, though unless you're a devoted hard-boiled fan, there's not much to excite the modern reader aside from Hammett's prose and plotting, which is very good and an excellent example of how to structure a novel. The book is better than the movie, but see the movie(s) too for an education in cinematography and literature both.