The Maltese Falcon

Wow! I love mystery noir novels, and I've read a lot of great ones but this one has become my favourite. Sam Spade is such a great character and Hammett's prose is exquisite. Highly recommended!

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2JIJMEGPC2WMD/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B07DMMC2XG


The past is a different country and I may need more of a roadmap.

My previous experience with Dashiell Hammett is with watching the Bogart classic, The Maltese Falcon. The charm of the movie is really the odd characters - Peter Lorre's oleaginous Joel Cairo, Sydney Greenstreet's pompous “Mr. Guttman” and, of course, Humphrey Bogart's “man's man,” Sam Spade. The movie marches through its paces with these different odd characters vying for the “McGuffin” of a fabulous gem-encrusted statue, while Spade plays catch-up without letting anyone know that he doesn't know the whole story.

The movie maps onto the book in an almost - but not quite - one for one relationship. I listened to the book as an audio book and the reader gave Cairo and Guttman the famous Lorre/Greenstreet voices. From the book, I found a real sense of Hammett as a scriptwriter for movies. His novel reads as a movie script, which is to say it is all superficial, objective movement, description and dialogue with no internal thoughts or reactions of the characters. (The audio book was an excellent presentation, by the way.)

For the rare person who doesn't know, the story is set in San Francisco in the 1930s. Sam Spade is a private detective hired by a very hot redhead to find her little sister. Spade turns over the simple job of trailing the cad who ran off with the sister. Then, Spade learns that Archer was shot and killed on the job, and that the cad, a man named Thursby was also shot and killed, and that he is being fitted for at least one of the murders. Then, no longer than it takes to strip Archer's name off the firm's door, and try to cool an affair with Archer's wife, Spade learns that there was no little sister, that his client's name is really Bridget O'Shaugnessy, and that she is competing with some very odd characters to find a McGuffin, but what it is and what it all means is something that Spade needs to figure out.

have to say I don't understand why this is such a classic. Was it the romance of the exotic - San Francisco in the 1930s, a treasure dating from the Middle-Ages, and a crazy bunch of characters so different from the American middle-class? For myself, reading this book as a piece of literature at a remove of 100 years, I don't quite understand. None of the characters were likeable. One reviewer has described two of the characters - Spade and O'Shaugnessy - are sociopaths, which is honestly an apt description. Were people in the '30s really indifferent to what an immoral louse Spade was, much less that O'Shaugnessy is lying conniver who would frame Spade in a red-hot second if it could net her a steak dinner? Did Americans of 100 years ago believe that the relationship between Spade and O'Shaugnessy was real or attractive in any sense? There is a lengthy conclusion where O'Shaugnessy keeps telling Spade that he loves her and keeps saying that maybe he does, and though it all, I was annoyed because of the absence of any “chemistry” between” the two.

Was there chemistry on the movie? I don't think so, but I was kept amused by Lorre and Greenstreet, so I had no cause to complain.

Another odd feature is the “screenwriting” style of the book. Spade does things and says things because he just knows to do and say those things. The reader isn't let in on Spade's reasons because the reader doesn't learn anything that isn't something that can be objectively witnessed from the outside. This leads to some unexplained behavior and developments, as well as the occasional bit of laughably inept exposition to bring the reader up to speed.

The other bit of awkwardness is how everything just seems to come to Spade. I didn't notice it in the movie, but in the book, Spade really doesn't discover anything by sleuthing. Instead, he gets approached - usually by people holding guns - by O'Shaugnessy, Cairo, Wilmer and, finally, Captain Jacoby (played in the movie by Walter Huston) with the McGuffin. OK, fine, it moves the story along, but for a writing style that is based on “show, don't tell,” it seems that Spade's insight and cleverness is all “tell, don't show.”

Finally, one wonders how long before this book gets the same treatment as Huckleberry Finn for its fossilized sexism. Women are treated as children or sex objects by Spade. He chucks them on the chin and calls them “angel” and discounts their views as if they were children. Perhaps the attraction of the book was that in a culture that treated women as children, Bridget O'Shaugnessy is depicted as a woman willing to murder like any man? I am not someone interested in listening to contemporary grievances about paternalism, but you can see in this book how much things have changed.

A plus feature for the book is that occasionally Hammett will toss out a line of classic dialogue or insert a phrase that became a classic of the detective genre. This is the book that taught America that “gunsel” was a hired “gun” rather than a “homosexual.” Likewise, at one point, Spade mentions that Wilmer was on the “gooseberry lay,” which I naturally assumed was obscene, but in fact involves stealing clothes.

However, because of my idiosyncratic interest in history, I found The Maltese Falcon interesting as a piece of history. There is a view of a slice of American Culture in The Maltese Falcon which is fascinating. Likewise, for anyone who knows San Francisco, the references to locations in old San Francisco are fascinating (and tempt me to make a visit to them the next time I am in San Francisco.) If this was a contemporary mystery book, I would probably find it to be too cliche, too confusing, with too many fortunate accidents for Sam Spade, and unattractive characters, and give it a soft three, but as a bit of history, I give it a four.

3.5 stars. Interestingly written, but the story felt a bit slow and doesn't go anywhere really.

Sam Spade and Miles Archer are hired by Miss Wonderly to follow a man Miss Wonderly says has run off with her sister. Before long, two people are found dead and Spade is a suspect in their murders.

A wonderful old-fashioned mystery.

“The Maltese Falcon” by Dashiell Hammett is a thrilling detective novel that keeps the reader on the edge of their seat. The story follows private detective Sam Spade as he becomes embroiled in a dangerous game of cat and mouse over the titular Maltese Falcon statue.

Hammett's writing is sharp and succinct, with no wasted words. The dialogue crackles with wit and tension, and the characters are vividly drawn. Sam Spade is a complex and intriguing protagonist, and the femme fatale Brigid O'Shaughnessy is a classic character in the noir genre.

The plot is twisty and unpredictable, with plenty of double-crosses and unexpected turns. The ending is satisfying, with all loose ends tied up and justice served.

The only reason I didn't give “The Maltese Falcon” a full 5 stars is because, at times, the pacing felt a bit slow. However, this is a minor quibble in an otherwise excellent book.

Overall, I would highly recommend “The Maltese Falcon” to fans of detective fiction and noir. It's a classic for a reason, and Hammett's writing is as sharp and entertaining today as it was when the book was first published.

I listened to the BBC Radio 4 Extra production.

I honestly don't see what all of the hoopla is about. Not that this was a bad story, it was fine–but that's just it, it was only just fine.

Uhg. I finally finished this. Yes it took me a month to get through a pretty short novel simply because I just didn't care. It was part of my library system's Big Reads and I am proud of everything the system did for the book and to encourage people to read. I just really dislike murder mysteries and I found this one to be super over the top.

Knowing that the book is a classic really hinders my review in a way. About halfway through the Maltese Falcon i was could not help but think about why its considered so great. The book has unlikable and scummy characters who are hard to root for and as i neared the last few pages became even more disappointed. Maybe the film is better and allows for more character development but the old detective story is just plain bland. We have had several decades of similarly paced books based on detectives and maybe this was groundbreaking at the time. I just did not have a great time with it in the present.

Crime fiction does not get better than this. Hammett's atmospheric prose puts you smack in the middle of 1930 San Francisco. Enjoy with a plate of “chops, baked potato and sliced tomatoes.”

Great book, great read, but I can't give it more than three stars. Not because it is bad, but because it just didn't connect with me all too much. I still recommend it because this one is like the essential private detective story if there is any.

The Maltese Falcon is probably one of those quintessential mystery/detective novels. I found the writing to be rather spare, and a touch misogynistic. This is definitely a “boys book” in that at the time it was written the target audience was most likely men, and men of a certain temperament as well.

I enjoyed reading this as an example of the genre and as a period piece, but I don't know that I am likely to reread it any time soon.

anticlimactic.

I enjoy the novels of [b:Raymond Chandler 2052 The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41AGA624Z5L.SL75.jpg 1222673], but for me THIS is the best hard-boiled private eye novel ever. Hammett's laconic style, his punchy dialogue and his concise and driving storytelling make this the standard to measure all others against.