The Maltese Falcon

Look out folks here comes GREATNESS When you re slapped, you ll take it and like it image error GIFSoup Sam Spade played by the legendary Humphrey Bogart bitch slapping the manhood out of Joel Cairo played by Peter Lorre d telling him to shut up and take it Do I really need to continue the review after that That is perfection However, for those tough sells I will continue with my Why is this book Awesome thesis First, this story IS NOIR Now there are a lot of wonderful noirs out there, many of t [...]

Born in 1894 and serving as a sergeant in World War I, Dashiell Hammett used his experiences to become one of the premier detective writers of the first half of the twentieth century Set in Depression Era San Francisco and introducing the world to Samuel Spade, Hammett s The Maltese Falcon became a detective story that many in the genre still try to measure up to today A classic that helped change the way writers told detective stories, The Maltese Falcon is a classic case that contains all the [...]

2012 re readSam Spade s partner is murdered and Sam is determined to find his killer But what does Miles Archer s murder have to do with the client he was working for or the mysterious Maltese Falcon What can I say about one of the Big Two pulp detective novels, the other being The Big Sleep Well, let s seeThe Maltese Falcon embodies a lot of what made pulp detective fiction great, leading to hordes of imitators You ve got the wise cracking detective who has a way with the ladies, gunplay, decei [...]

Everything seemed separated for the first sixty pages, with no connection whatsoever But the story was full of suspense and unfolded with many surprises after that The plot was very captivating, and seemed very realistic The main thread is Maltese Falcon I m not going to tell you what it is, as it would be a spoiler and I hate to give spoilers around which everything revolves Its a good read and keeps you guessing till the last.Highly recommend

My top ten reasons why this Dashiell Hammett is one of the greatest crime novels ever written 1 The Voice Tough, Crisp hardboiled the story isn t told in first person but certainly has the feel of first person since we are so close to Sam Spade it s as if we re peering over the detective s shoulder from first to last page.2 The City The buildings and streets in San Francisco have such a tangible presence, even today, after nearly 100 years, they still give Maltese Falcon tours 3 Femme Fatale Bri [...]

Book Review4 out of 5 stars to The Maltese Falcon, a classic mystery novel written in 1930 by Dashiell Hammett If you ask a mystery fan when the genre started, a good chunk of them will say during the Golden Age 1920s 30s with authors like Dashiell Hammett, specifically with the creation of the Sam Spade character Immediately what comes to mind is the old fashioned black and white movies with the coat and hat on the detective, the accents and the chase scenes While these are all true, few have a [...]

C S Lewis once observed that you shouldn t review individual books or stories of a general type that you dislike, because your basic distaste for the genre is apt to blind you to the relative merits of how well the author handles the individual features of his her work, and how it stacks up against other works of the same sort When it comes to the whole noir school of detective fiction, that s probably advice I should heed based both on the little of it that I ve read and what I ve read about it [...]

I once read the following in some TV guide regarding the classic movie adaptation The 1941 mystery is the yardstick against which all private eye films are measured It is even true of the novel Never before or since has a protagonist been forced to look so deeply within himself, to have to explain who he is to so many while not completely understanding why he is that way himself Sam Spade knows what he has to do, and externally he knows why he has to do it He acts assuredly, without hesitation [...]

Welcome to Spade and Archer detective agency One day a gorgeous woman came in asking to help tracking her sister who ran away with a bad guy The down payment was good, so the detectives took the case, no questions asked As the direct result one of the detectives Sam Spade got to experience all of the traditional noir fun while readers follow ever twisting plot I said it countless times before and I will say it again Sam Spade is the grandfather of all PIs in all noir, in particular all Californi [...]

I don t mind a reasonable amount of trouble I haven t seen the famous movie version of this book starring a young, dreamy Humphrey Bogart, but now I sure want to.This 1930 s noir beauty set the template for hard boiled detective stories, paving the way for other writers like Raymond Chandler and James M Cain The action begins when our hero Sam Spade, finds out his partner, Phil Archer is found shot while on a job The story has all you could ask for a tough, smart private eye, a gorgeous femme fa [...]

You got nothin on this book, see Yeah That s right, skedaddle and quick like Private detective Sam Spade smells trouble when a crazy dame walks into his office, and sure enough, his life is soon turned topsy turvy Spade gets all tangled up in a fishy double murder The coppers are on him, he s on to the dame and people keep popping outta the woodwork goin on and on about this g d bird If things keep up like this somebody s gonna get themselves killed dead.Since the book s publication, the Spade c [...]

Dashiell Hammett s The Maltese Falcon introduces the world to Sam Spade and established a benchmark upon which a genre the hard boiled crime novel was popularized.Of his character, Hammett says 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 For your private detective does not or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague want to be an erudite solver [...]

It s my BIBLE.

Call me an uncultured Cretin it s true , but I ve never seen the movie, so I have nothing to compare it to but the only other classic noir book I ve ever read told you I was a Cretin , Raymond Chandler s The Big Sleep Where Chandler s prose sets a baseline from which he can occasionally spring a trick in the form of a clever turn of phrase, Hammett s prose is as straightforward as it gets, which I saw as a minus That said, the blandness of the language lets the reader concentrate on plot and cha [...]

This novel is set in 1920 s San Francisco and creates the character of Sam Spade, a name now synonymous with crime detective fiction And Modern Library ranks The Maltese Falcon in it s 100 best novels of the 20th century One of the remarkable things about the novel is that it s not dated at all The setting could be 1980 as well as 1929 The cast is small and well defined, and the plot is straight forward, not complicated And with Hammett s ability to add exquisite detail, the end result is a mast [...]

Anybody who read this book without any prior knowledge of it would probably dismiss it as being full of cliches, archetypes and tropes, they would be dead wrong of course because this is where these tropes originated The anti hero, smooth talking P.I the femme fatale, the plucky Girl Friday secretary, the gay gangster uh, I m not sure if this actually caught on etc.I don t actually have a lot to say about this book because, while it was moderately enjoyable, it did not do anything above and beyo [...]

This book is pretty good Too bad it s not better known And it d be cool if somebody made a decent movie version of it someday

Story wise just so so for me It is supposed to be a classic, so I expected from the story.But, if you are looking for all the stereotypical hard boiled detective stuff dames and all that this book definitely delivers.

The writing in Hammett s Maltese Falcon seemed to get fluid as it went along It started out stilted and choppy I also wasn t particularly keen on his predilection for cataloging every single item of clothing every character was wearing Another thing that I found strange was his choice to describe in user manual detail exactly how, step by step, Sam Spade rolls a cigarette This happened early in the book and killed the forward movement of the narrative for me.But I read on because I found this t [...]

Here we go Book number two in my 25 crime fiction classic list After finishing this, I probably should ve started with this one but honestly, who s going to blame me for reading a Raymond Chandler novel first Sam Spade and Miles Archer, private eyes residing in San Fransisco, are hired by a woman to procure the safe return of her little sister after she has run off with another man While Spade accepts the job, he doesn t completely buy Ms Wonderly s story feeling that there is to what she s tel [...]

Book Circle Reads 36Rating 3.5 of five, because I love the movie The Publisher Says Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett s archetypally tough San Francisco detective, is noir than L.A Confidential and vulnerable than Raymond Chandler s Marlowe In The Maltese Falcon, the best known of Hammett s Sam Spade novels including The Dain Curse and The Glass Key , Spade is tough enough to bluff the toughest thugs and hold off the police, risking his reputation when a beautiful woman begs for his help, while kno [...]

So, a dame walks into a private detective s officeop me if you ve heard this one before Let s be honest, you probably have But luckily this is no ordinary dame And the office belongs to no ordinary detective They are Miss Wonderly not her only name, by the way and Sam Spade, the mold by which all hard boiled fast talking slang laden detective stories are made The Maltese Falcon chronicles their shared adventures chasing a valuable, bejeweled falcon statuette that s been stolen and brought to San [...]

Classic hard boiled detective story from 1929 that feels both cool and passionate, ruthless and righteous, slick and defiant, charming and stubborn, resourceful and gloomy Here are a few quotes Samuel Spade s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the flexible v of his mouth His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v His yellow grey eyes were horizontal The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown [...]

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there are these big stories, stories that aren t necessarily long but are tremendously meaningful they carry seeds of big things, of fundamental truths, that whisper to us of some big answer, the kind of answer we might wish for or even dread but don t dare believe chipping away at the bumpers in the pinball game of our brains, these are ideas that compel us, that make us pause, and consider just what it s all about, and where we fit in there s a story like that in this book it s called the flit [...]

Sam Spade, slow baked, hard boiled detective is hired by the mysterious red head Miss Wonderley to track down her kidnapped sister or so he thinks The trail doesn t even get a chance to warm up when Sam Spade s soft boiled detective partner is shot in the chest Dead men don t tell tales and so it s up to Sam pick up the trail and add two and two together, which incidentally in this case makes 10,000 Sam is also forced to decide if a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush when he finds himself [...]

I love detective fiction This was a horrible, horrible book I can think of no redeeming qualities in it to recommend it to a single soul Hmmrhaps if you re suffering from insomnia, and find yourself awake at 3am, and you ve already counted a couple of thousand sheep, and you re losing hope of ever seeing Mr Sandman again You might consider it Or, if you re a weak, ineffectual man who s never had a date in his life, and enjoys acting out his hopelessly unrealized fantasies in which he sleeps with [...]

Good stuff I can t believe it s taken me this long to read The Maltese Falcon I guess part of the problem was the movie I ve seen it a zillion times and I m not necessarily a Falcon junkie It s a great flick Bogart and rest of the cast are terrific, and it s fairly faithful to the book But with that kind of saturation, I found as I attempted to read it the past, that everything in the book seemed too familiar, and I would usually set it down 20 or 30 pages in And then, just now, along came a den [...]

It becomes a little difficult to follow your detective protagonist if the author doesn t let you inside his head.That is what was happening to me for the first half of the book The other half, though, was a thrill As the layers of lies started to peel off the plot, the story became exciting Often, in detective fiction, the focus stays on the story and on what happens next, and not much attention is paid to the characters individually It was not so in this book Here, the author, while executing t [...]

There is something about reading a book that your Dad could have read when he was a teenager This is that kind of a book for me My Dad was born in 1920 and The Maltese Falcon was published in 1930 I am pretty sure that this pulp fiction wasn t on the bookshelf of his southern Baptist household, but it is the right era.So what do you do when you run into a book published in the 1930s You watch the movie with Humphrey Bogart made in the 1940s What a terrific movie She s a knockout If the book is h [...]