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The Maltese Falcon

Dashiell Hammett

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What Members Thought

Mar 13, 2018 Tom Britz rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

The Maltese Falcon is a deserved classic of Noir Detective fiction. The writing was crisp and no-nonsense and I could picture Humphrey Bogart playing this part, even though I've never seen it. . .yet. Dashiell Hammett tailored it smoothly so that Bogart was a natural for the big screen edition.
The case begins when a femme fatale comes into the offices of Spade And Archer. What starts out to be a simple case of tailing her male friend ends up with Sam Spade's partner Miles Archer being gunned dow ...more

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Nov 07, 2022 Monique rated it liked it · review of another edition

The crime story is good but Sam Spade is really a bit of a dick, and not the PI variety. This is my second Spade novel and I think it’s my last. I don’t like my heroes to be entitled, self important tossers.

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Apr 13, 2010 Justin rated it it was amazing

Shelves: audiobook, point-blank, read-in-2010, read-in-may-2010, read-in-2018, read-in-apr-2018, read-in-2022, read-in-jan-2022

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Point Blank Podcast Review (pointblankpodcast.com)

In the second episode of Point Blank we spent time with Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest.

Today, we return to the godfather of hardboiled crime fiction with his best known work, The Maltese Falcon.

This is our twelfth episode and the last in the “classics” phase of this podcast. From here on out, we will feature a greater variety of hardboiled, noir and detective works from contemporary, international, and lesser known authors, in addit ...more

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Jan 09, 2012 Jake rated it really liked it

Shelves: mystery-thriller-crime

One of the classics of the hard-boiled genre, Hammett's classic is a good one though I don't think it holds a candle to his sublime "Red Harvest." The dialogue is great and the plot is thick but I felt that it came just short of the greatness by which the work is normally assessed by. Not to dwell on that though, it's a great story in its own right and there were no disappointments from this reader.

Re-read (12/18/2018):
I had read The Maltese Falcon years ago but remembered very little of it asid One of the classics of the hard-boiled genre, Hammett's classic is a good one though I don't think it holds a candle to his sublime "Red Harvest." The dialogue is great and the plot is thick but I felt that it came just short of the greatness by which the work is normally assessed by. Not to dwell on that though, it's a great story in its own right and there were no disappointments from this reader.

Re-read (12/18/2018):
I had read The Maltese Falcon years ago but remembered very little of it aside from it having a complicated plot. Since I read it the same year I started delving hard into crime fiction, it kind of got lost in the shuffle of other classics I read, especially compared to Hammett’s sensational Red Harvest, a pulp masterpiece that would get my vote for best crime novel of all-time.

But as I have never seen the movie, and keep forgetting the thread of what many allege to be one of the great works of contemporary literature written in the English language, I felt like I should revisit this to see if there was something I missed in my initial need to consume fictional works of crime.

The answer is…no. Not really. The plot isn’t as complex as I recall, which is good. But this is a good-but-not-great work written by a writer who has more talent than this. The dialogue is good, sure but the characters are thin and you’re left wondering why even bother injecting Spade into this nefarious affair in the first place as ice from the need for a story. I think what The Maltese Falcon gets love for more than anything is being the OG of the anti-hero in crime fiction. For years, I had considered Sam Spade to be the force of good amidst the people lurking in the bad San Francisco underworld but Hammett introducing him as “Satan’s Angel” and not giving him many redeemable features shows that we’re not supposed to really like this guy. Nowadays, media is oversaturated with the male anti-hero, doing bad things to stop bad people. Again, much of this can likely be traced back to The Maltese Falcon.

It’s good, not great. Another re-read might help me appreciate Spade’s character more when the sun finally sets on that character’s archetype. ...more

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Jul 01, 2017 Bill rated it it was amazing

Shelves: literary-novel, entertainment-mystery

I first read "Falcon" 40 years ago. I was more impressed with the book this time through. Hammett's book really is the Ur-text of modern American writing, both literary and "genre." I am sure Hammett was influenced by Hemingway, but there is something that rings more true in Hammett's cynical and ironic take on a pulp story than in Hemingway's meaning-fraught exercises in terseness. ...more

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Dec 04, 2015 Louis Lowy rated it it was amazing

Dashiell Hammett’s classic detective story. It gripped me from page one even though I knew the story via John Huston’s movie adaptation of the same name. Besides the amazing plot, what Hammett does so masterfully is to give us character insight through their dialogue, physical description and actions only. There is not one sentence of interior monologue, and none is needed. We understand who and how these characters operate strictly through observation. I would imagine the toughest part of Husto ...more

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