Cover image of "The Maltese Falcon," one of the first books in the hard-boiled detective genre

What’s your experience when you re-read a novel you loved when you were much younger? Mine is mixed. As often as not, I discover either that the book reflects concerns of mine in a long-past life or that the style comes across as archaic. Very few stories hold up well a century later—even those that have found their way onto “all-time best” lists. And that’s what I discovered in Dashiell Hammett’s iconic tale introducing San Francisco private detective Sam Spade. The Maltese Falcon is best known today through the 1941 film of the same name starring Humphrey Bogart. But critics regard the novel as more significant for launching the hard-boiled detective genre and inventing the archetypes of the femme fatale and the hard-drinking detective. Which helps explain why the book fell flat as I re-read it, since neither stereotype fits today’s cultural sensibilities.

A darling of literary critics

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo introduces the Kindle edition I read, and he treats the novel as serious literature that far transcends the genre it launched. Unsurprisingly, he loves the book—like most critics. Using the methods of contemporary literary criticism, he dissects Sam Spade’s character with the precision of a surgeon. It’s an approach no average reader is likely to do. The gist of it is that Hammett portrays Spade as neither good nor evil but as an equivocal character full of contradictions. This may have been a revelation in 1930, when the novel was first published. Today, in our skeptical age, such characters populate thousands of books, films, and television shows. Ho-hum.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1930) 128 pages ★★★☆☆

Photo of the stars of the film "The Maltese Falcon," an iconic production in the hard-boiled detective genre
From left to right, Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, and Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon (1941), directed by John Huston. Image: Britannica

What’s a “Maltese falcon?”

If you’re young, or one of the 12 people over the age of 50 who has never seen the film or read the novel, you may want to know where the book’s title comes from. Because Hammett takes his sweet time introducing the “black bird” in the novel.

Allegedly, the Maltese falcon is a one-foot-tall statuette encrusted with precious jewels. It’s many hundreds of years old, the gift of an order of Crusader knights to the King of Spain for granting them ownership of the island of Malta. In today’s terms, it’s incalculably valuable. And ithe principal characters in Hammett’s novel and the film fight to the death to possess it: Spade (Bogart), Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), and Casper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet). The series of conflicts that erupts among them leads to several untimely deaths and engages a police lieutenant who tries to blame Spade for one of the murders.

Four problems I found

I experienced four problems in re-reading this book.

  • The plot is convoluted and hard to follow. So hard that it undermines the very real suspense Hammett builds throughout. And he crams it all into just over 100 pages, so that the prose is dense and sometimes requires re-reading.
  • Hammett’s dialogue, which is typical of the hard-boiled detective genre that followed the book’s publication, comes across as lame.
  • The sexism in the story is overpowering, with Spade addressing every woman as a girl and using terms of endearment with them such as “sweetheart” and “darling.”
  • Hammett’s physical descriptions of the characters is unnecessarily detailed. To my mind, these digressions get in the way of the story.

About the author

Photo of Dashiell Hammett, author of this early novel in the hard-boiled detective genre
Dashiell Hammett. Image: The Paris Review

Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) is the creator of the still-recognizable characters Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, and the comic strip character Secret Agent X-9. He wrote five detective novels and a slew of short stories as well as numerous other works of fiction. Hammett was also a screenwriter of note and gained fame in the 1940s and 50s in Hollywood. But he may be best known today for his refusal to answer a prosecutor’s questions in court during the Red Scare and served in prison for a time for contempt of court. (Hammett was an active member of the Communist Party.) During the 1950s, he was blacklisted as a writer in Hollywood.

Hammett grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore and attended high school for a year in the latter city before dropping out. After holding several jobs, he went to work as an operative for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, where he worked from 1915 to 1922. He was married for 16 years and fathered two children.

I’ve read all of Dashiell Hammett’s novels. But since I began posting reviews online, I’ve reread only two: this one and Red Harvest – Continental Op #1 (The original hard-boiled detective?).

If this book intrigues you, check out 10 top novels about private detectives.

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