Overview

Samuel Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) was an American author widely recognized as the trailblazer of hard-boiled detective fiction with his unsentimental, breakneck storytelling chock-full of fast-paced, slangy dialogue and abrupt, explosive violence. In 1930 he published The Maltese Falcon, the novel that sharpened the genre to a lethal point, unveiling Sam Spade - a private eye with a moral code all his own and a talent for keeping his face as unreadable as a blank ledger. In a San Francisco where every kindness is a setup and every partnership is a temporary convenience, he's hired to track down a missing woman, a search that spirals into a deadly hunt for a legendary falcon statuette, drawing Spade into the orbit of a trio of schemers whose charm is as dangerous as their desperation, each willing to lie, bleed, or kill for a chance to touch its promise. As the bodies stack up, the prize proves as treacherous as the people chasing it, and Spade must navigate a maze of deceit where survival means nothing if it costs him the one thing worse than death - being played for a fool.

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9781963228625

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Reviews

""The Maltese Falcon was one of the best books of its kind ever written. It struck the publishing world and the reading world - which is something entirely distinct from the literary world - like a thunderclap. Nothing has been the same since."" -John Crosby, New York Herald Tribune ""A knockout detective is Sam Spade."" -The Boston Globe ""We want to go on record as saying that this story is a marvelous piece of writing - the finest detective story it has ever been our privilege to read in book form, in any magazine of any kind, or in manuscript. Don't miss it."" -Joseph Shaw, editor of Black Mask ""[Hammett] writes with a lead-pipe and poisoned arrows as coups de grace. He stands alone as ace shocker . . . And now The Maltese Falcon, a button-button-who's-got-the-falcon? of San Francisco. It is everything you want . . . The writing is better than Hemingway."" -Ted Shane, Judge ""The sheer force of Hammett's hard, brittle writing lifts the book out of the general run of crime spasms and places it aloof and alone as a brave chronicle of a hard-boiled man, unscrupulous, conscienceless, unique."" -John G. Neihardt, St. Louis Post-Dispatch ""The best detective story America has yet produced."" -Alexander Woolcott ""There are detective-story writers, and then there is Dashiell Hammett. I can think of no one in the world who is his match . . . The book is written with the snap and bite of a whiplash . . . The Maltese Falcon has a thousand virtues, of observation, of detail, of nuance, and of effect."" -Elrick B. Davis, The Cleveland Press

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