Literary Thoughts edition 
presents 
The Maltese Falcon 
by Dashiell Hammett 

"The Maltese Falcon" is a 1930 published detective novel by Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961), telling the story of San Francisco based private detective Samuel "Sam" Spade, who gets hired by a beautiful young woman, "Miss Wonderly", to follow a guy named Floyd Thursby. Sam Spade and his partner Miles Archer take the job, but later that night, Archer is found shot to death. A few hours later, Thursby is also killed and Spade is a suspect. Sam Spade finds out, that it is all about the title object, a foot-high black statuette of unknown but substantial value. 
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**Amazon.com Review
Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett's archetypally tough San Francisco detective, is more noir than L.A. Confidential and more 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 knowing that betrayal may deal him a new hand in the next moment.
Spade's partner is murdered on a stakeout; the cops blame him for the killing; a beautiful redhead with a heartbreaking story appears and disappears; grotesque villains demand a payoff he can't provide; and everyone wants a fabulously valuable gold statuette of a falcon, created as tribute for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. Who has it? And what will it take to get it back? Spade's solution is as complicated as the motives of the seekers assembled in his hotel room, but the truth can be a cold comfort indeed.
Spade is bigger (and blonder) in the book than in the movie, and his Mephistophelean countenance is by turns seductive and volcanic. Sam knows how to fight, whom to call, how to rifle drawers and secrets without leaving a trace, and just the right way to call a woman "Angel" and convince her that she is. He is the quintessence of intelligent cool, with a wise guy's perfect pitch. If you only know the movie, read the book. If you're riveted by Chinatown or wonder where Robert B. Parker's Spenser gets his comebacks, read the master. --Barbara Schlieper
Review
Mystery novel by Dashiell Hammett, generally considered his finest work. It originally appeared as a serial in Black Mask magazine in 1929 and was published in book form the next year. The novel's sustained tension is created by vivid scenes and by the pace and spareness of the author's style. The other major attraction of The Maltese Falcon is its colorful cast of characters; they include the antiheroic detective Sam SPADE; Brigid O'Shaughnessy, a deceptive beauty; Joel Cairo, an effete Levantine whose gun gives him courage; the very fat and jovial but sinister Casper Gutman; and Gutman's "gunsel" Wilmer, eager to be feared. All of them are looking for the Maltese falcon, a fabulously valuable 16th-century artifact. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

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