The Maltese Falcon is a 1930 detective novel by American writer Dashiell Hammett, originally serialized in the magazine Black Mask beginning with the September 1929 issue. The story is told entirely in external third-person narrative; there is no description whatsoever of any character's thoughts or feelings, only what they say and do, and how they look. The novel has been adapted several times for the cinema.
The main character, Sam Spade (who also appeared later in some lesser-known short stories), was a departure from Hammett's nameless detective, The Continental Op. Spade combined several features of previous detectives, notably his cold detachment, keen eye for detail, unflinching and sometimes ruthless determination to achieve his own form of justice, and a complete lack of sentimentality. In 1990 the novel ranked 10th in Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time list by the Crime Writers' Association. Five years later, in a similar list by Mystery Writers of America, the novel was ranked third.
Plot
Sam Spade is a private detective in San Francisco, in partnership with Miles Archer. The beautiful "Miss Wonderley" hires them to follow Floyd Thursby, who she claims has run off with her sister. Archer takes the first stint but is found shot dead that night. Thursby is also killed later and Spade is a suspect. The next morning, Spade coolly tells his office secretary, Effie Perine, to have the office door repainted to read simply "Samuel Spade".
"Miss Wonderley" is soon revealed to be an acquisitive adventuress named Brigid O'Shaughnessy, who is involved in the search for a black statuette of unknown but substantial value. Others are after this falcon, including Joel Cairo, an effeminate criminal, and Casper Gutman, a fat man accompanied by a vicious young gunman, Wilmer Cook. O'Shaughnessy begs for Spade's protection while telling him as little as possible. They meet with Cairo at Spade's apartment, and Spade again presses O'Shaughnessy for details; again she stalls but kisses Spade. The next morning, she is asleep in his bed. Leaving her there, Spade slips out to search her apartment.
Effie believes O'Shaughnessy "is all right" and Spade should help her. Effie agrees to hide her at her own home, but O'Shaughnessy disappears again. When Spade meets Gutman in his hotel room, neither will tell what he knows. Spade implies he is looking out for himself, not O'Shaughnessy. Red herrings abound. The police suspect Spade in the shootings: he was sleeping with Archer's wife, Iva. The District Attorney ties the shootings to Dixie Monahan, a Chicago gambler who had employed Thursby as a bodyguard in the Far East.
At a second meeting, Gutman tells Spade the history of the tribute of the Maltese Falcon. It was made of gold and jewels by the 16th-century Knights of Malta as a gift to the King of Spain but was captured by pirates. After passing from owner to owner, at some time it was coated with black enamel to conceal its value. Gutman traced the falcon to General Kemidov, a Russian exile in Constantinople and hired O'Shaughnessy to get it; she brought in Cairo to help. O'Shaughnessy and Thursby fled with the falcon to Hong Kong and from there to San Francisco. During this conversation, Gutman drugs Spade, who passes out on the floor.
Spade awakens alone and returns to his office where a wounded ship's captain staggers in with a package containing the falcon and dies. O'Shaughnessy calls the office, begs for Spade's help, but sends him on a wild goose chase. When he returns, O'Shaughnessy is waiting in front of Spade's apartment building. Inside Spade's apartment they find Gutman, Wilmer, and Cairo in wait with guns drawn. Gutman presents $10,000 in cash for the falcon, but Spade argues that the police must arrest someone for the murders. During a fight, Spade knocks Wilmer out, and Gutman agrees to give Wilmer to the police.
Spade has Effie fetch the falcon, but Gutman discovers it is a fake (a decoy made by General Kemidov, or possibly the falcon of legend was never real). During the excitement, Wilmer escapes. Gutman decides to go to Constantinople for the real falcon; Cairo joins him and they leave. Spade then calls the police and tells them the story, adding that he has Wilmer's guns and other evidence. While they are waiting, he bullies O'Shaughnessy into confessing her real role.
Archer was shot with Thursby's gun, but by her. She has lied to him and double-crossed him. O'Shaughnessy admits all this, but pleads that she is in love with Spade. Maybe he does care for her, Spade admits, but tells her, "I won't play the sap for you"–for personal reasons as well as needing justice for his dead partner; if she can get off with a long prison term, he'll wait for her, but if she hangs, he'll always remember her. When the police arrive, he turns her in, and the police tell him Wilmer has just shot Gutman dead.
Background
Although Hammett himself worked for a time as a private detective for the Pinkerton Detective Agency in San Francisco (and used his given name, Samuel, for the story's protagonist), Hammett asserted that "Spade has no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been, and, in their cockier moments, thought they approached."[1]
Hammett reportedly drew upon his years as a detective in creating many of the other characters for The Maltese Falcon, which reworks elements from some of his stories published in Black Mask magazine in 1925, "The Whosis Kid" and "The Gutting of Couffignal".[2] The novel was serialized in five parts in Black Mask in 1929 and 1930 before being published in book form in 1930 by Alfred A. Knopf.
Adaptations
The novel has been adapted for film four times, twice under its original title:
The Maltese Falcon (1931), the first version, a pre-Code production starring Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade and Bebe Daniels as Brigid O'Shaughnessy. In 1936, Warner Brothers attempted to re-release the film but was denied approval by the Hays Production Codecensors because of its "lewd" content; this led to the production of the 1936 adaptation. It was not until after 1966 that unedited copies of the 1931 film could be shown in the United States.
Satan Met a Lady (1936), a comedic adaptation starring Bette Davis and Warren William, with Sam Spade becoming "Ted Shane". The film received poor reviews, and Davis later referred to the film as "junk".
The Maltese Falcon was produced by The Long Beach Shakespeare Company and premiered on April 29, 2005, when Hammett's book was adapted and directed by Martin Pope. Two years later the same company mounted a second adaptation, this one by Helen Borgers, the company's artistic director.[6]
Samuel Dashiell Hammett was an American writer of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories. He was also a screenwriter and political activist. Among the characters he created are Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, The Continental Op and the comic strip character Secret Agent X-9.
Nick and Nora Charles are fictional characters created by Dashiell Hammett in his novel The Thin Man. The characters were later adapted for film in a series of films between 1934 and 1947; for radio from 1941 to 1950; for television from 1957 through 1959; as a Broadway musical in 1991; and as a stage play in 2009.
Red Harvest (1929) is a novel by American writer Dashiell Hammett. The story is narrated by the Continental Op, a frequent character in Hammett's fiction, much of which is drawn from his own experiences as an operative of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. The plot follows the Op's investigation of several murders amid a labor dispute in a corrupt Montana mining town. Some of the novel was inspired by the Anaconda Road massacre, a 1920 labor dispute in the mining town of Butte, Montana.
Sam Spade is a fictional character and the protagonist of Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon. Spade also appeared in four lesser-known short stories by Hammett.
The Continental Op is a fictional character created by Dashiell Hammett. He is a private investigator employed as an operative of the Continental Detective Agency's San Francisco office. The stories are all told in the first person and his name is never given.
The Glass Key is a novel by American writer Dashiell Hammett. First published as a serial in Black Mask magazine in 1930, it then was collected in 1931. It tells the story of a gambler and racketeer, Ned Beaumont, whose devotion to Paul Madvig, a crooked political boss, leads him to investigate the murder of a local senator's son as a potential gang war brews. Hammett dedicated the novel to his onetime lover Nell Martin.
Garfield's Babes and Bullets is a 1989 animated television special directed by Phil Roman, based on a short story of the same name by Ron Tuthill in the book Garfield: His 9 Lives. It features Lorenzo Music as the voice of Garfield, the house cat, re-imagined as a private detective named Sam Spayed attempting to solve a murder mystery.
Satan Met a Lady is a 1936 American detective film directed by William Dieterle and starring Bette Davis and Warren William.
Hammett is a 1982 American neo-noir mystery film directed by Wim Wenders and executive produced by Francis Ford Coppola. The screenplay was written by Ross Thomas and Dennis O'Flaherty, based on the novel of the same name by Joe Gores. It stars Frederic Forrest as detective story writer Dashiell Hammett, who gets caught up in a mystery very much like one of his own stories. Marilu Henner plays Hammett's neighbor, Kit Conger, and Peter Boyle plays Jimmy Ryan, an old friend from Hammett's days as a Pinkerton agent. The film was entered into the 1982 Cannes Film Festival.
The Maltese Falcon is a 1931 American pre-Code crime film based on the 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett and directed by Roy Del Ruth. The film stars Ricardo Cortez as private detective Sam Spade and Bebe Daniels as femme fatale Ruth Wonderly. The supporting cast features Dudley Digges, Thelma Todd, Walter Long, Una Merkel, and Dwight Frye. Maude Fulton and Brown Holmes wrote the screenplay; one contemporaneous report said that Lucien Hubbard was assisting them.
The Maltese Falcon is a 1941 American film noir written and directed by John Huston in his directorial debut. Based on the 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, this remakes the 1931 film of the same name.
The Thin Man (1934) is a detective novel by Dashiell Hammett, originally published in a condensed version in the December 1933 issue of Redbook. It appeared in book form the following month. A film series followed, featuring the main characters Nick and Nora Charles, and Hammett was hired to provide scripts for the first two.
The Maltese Falcon may refer to:
Special Agent Samantha "Sam" Spade is a fictional character portrayed by actress Poppy Montgomery on the CBS television drama Without a Trace.
The Black Bird is a 1975 comedy film written and directed by David Giler and starring George Segal and Stéphane Audran. It is a comedic sequel to the John Huston film version of The Maltese Falcon (1941) with Segal playing Sam Spade's son, Sam Spade, Jr., and Lee Patrick and Elisha Cook Jr. reprising their roles of Effie Perrine and Wilmer Cook. It was Giler's first and only directorial effort.
The Maltese Falcon Society is an organization for admirers of Dashiell Hammett, his 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon, and hardboiled mystery books and writers in general. Founded in San Francisco in 1981, the organization is no longer active in the United States; however, a chapter in Japan has been active continuously since 1982. The Japanese branch of the society presents the Falcon Award, Japan's highest honor in the mystery field, to honor the best hardboiled mystery novel published in Japan.
Joseph Nicholas Gores was an American mystery writer. He was known best for his novels and short stories set in San Francisco and featuring the fictional Dan Kearney and Associates private investigation firm specializing in repossessing cars, a thinly veiled escalation of his own experiences as a confidential sleuth and repo man. Gores was also recognized for his novels Hammett, Spade & Archer and his Edgar Award-winning or -nominated works, such as A Time of Predators, 32 Cadillacs and Come Morning.
Getting Even (1971) is Woody Allen's first collection of humorous stories, essays, and one short play. Most pieces were first published in The New Yorker between 1966 and 1971.
Mister Dynamite is a 1935 American action film directed by Alan Crosland and written by Doris Malloy and Harry Clork. The film stars Edmund Lowe, Jean Dixon, Victor Varconi, Esther Ralston, Verna Hillie and Minor Watson. The film was released on April 22, 1935, by Universal Pictures.
David Fechheimer, nicknamed "Fech," was an American private investigator based in San Francisco. He worked on many cases involving celebrities or other notables, including Patty Hearst, Martha Stewart, Kobe Bryant, Timothy McVeigh and Angela Davis.
Herron, Don (2009). The Dashiell Hammett Tour: Thirtieth Anniversary Guidebook. San Francisco: Vince Emery Productions.
Layman, Richard (2000). Literary Masterpieces. Vol 3, The Maltese Falcon. Farmington Hills, Michigan: Gale Group.
Layman, Richard, ed. (2005). Discovering The Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade: The Evolution of Dashiell Hammett's Masterpiece, Including John Huston's Movie with Humphrey Bogart. San Francisco: Vince Emery Productions,.
Miller, Walter James (1988). Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon: A Critical Commentary. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Stone, Dan (2006). An Introduction to The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett: Audio Guide. Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts.
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