The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett


While reading The Maltese Falcon, I felt a strange predilection for martinis, cinched-waist suits and hand-rolled cigarettes. And I don’t even smoke.

Set against the gritty noir background of 1920s San Francisco, where real men can hold their drink and the women are all dames, The Maltese Falcon finds our hero, Sam Spade minding his own business when a beautiful damsel in distress begs him for help in finding her sister. Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, agrees to tail the man suspected of kidnapping the sister, but is murdered while on the job. And from there, the plot thickens. I don’t want to give too much away, but I can say is that the lovely lady isn’t what she first appears to be . . . and everyone wants to get their hands on a certain statue of a falcon.

I’ve seen the movie adaptation, but all I can remember from it is a grainy Humphrey Bogart with a cigarette dangling from sardonically smiling lips. Which is a good thing, since knowing the ending would have ruined the book, which was, on the whole, a ripping good read.

I felt a bit guilty indulging, though. I’m pretty sure that, even though I’m only three books into the Reading Project, I’m already cheating. Although The Maltese Falcon may be at the top of its genre, and one of the original examples of noir (a genre that later became so popular as to almost make this forerunner a cliche), it’s really commercial – and not literary – fiction. Which goes against the grain of what the Reading Project is supposed to be about: reading boring books I wouldn’t otherwise get through.

But, screw it, I loved the book. And it was a nice palate cleanser after all of the heavy-handed imagery of The Sun Also Rises.

The Maltese Falcon gets an A+ from me. Straight up with a twist.

 

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