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The Maltese Falcon

(Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)

By Dashiell Hammett

(48)

| Paperback | 9780679722649

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Book Description

A treasure worth killing for. Sam Spade, a slightly shopworn private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. A perfumed grafter named Joel Cairo, a fat man name Gutman, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. These are the ingrContinue

Critics

Whodunnits for summer days

Crime outsells everything else on audio, especially now with summer holidays looming and people looking for something not too taxing to listen to in the car or on the beach. Purists will opt to download Raskolnikov's criminal career unabridged (runni ... (read full critics)

guardian.co.uk published on Fri, 24 Sep 2010

5 Reviews

I've loved this movie for years and it was great to read the book it was based on. It's always interesting to see how writing the 30s and 40s was a lot less scrutinized than Hollywood. Not only did they come right out and say that Cairo was gay in the book but he was also in love/lust with the kid w ... (continue)

I've loved this movie for years and it was great to read the book it was based on. It's always interesting to see how writing the 30s and 40s was a lot less scrutinized than Hollywood. Not only did they come right out and say that Cairo was gay in the book but he was also in love/lust with the kid who did all the killings. They also explicitly said how Sam and Bridget slept together, and the very unromantic reasons for doing so. In fact if there seemed to be any true romance with Sam in this book it seemed to be with the secretary. Bridget he admired for her ruthlessness but only at the very end did it seem like he might love her. The other great moment was when Sam and Bridget were having a midnight meal, he put his tablecloth on the table before they ate, cause back then even hard boiled detectives used tablecloths!
I liked how Sam wasn't really a tough guy, he was tall and a looked, I loved the description of him as a "blonde satan" but he wasn't even a hard drinker compared with most pulp novels. He got away with everything by just out thinking the police and criminals around him.
All told the book was very enjoyable. I really love every novel of Hammet's that I've read so far and am going to hunt down all that I can find by him.

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Robot-mel said on Sep 8, 2010 about the Hardcover edition | Add your feedback

THey say this is the father of all the "hard-boiled" detectives we now have: well, it is hard-boiled alright, and it would seem that in eighty years his descendants have not gone terribly far from here! A great read, and a very convoluted, gripping story, set in splendid San Francisco.

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ilariainthelibrary said on Jun 13, 2010 | Add your feedback

nice look at the hard-boiled detective novels

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wilkinsjordan said on Jan 4, 2010 about the Hardcover edition | Add your feedback

Read this for the Big Read. Written quite well, but Sam Spade is not my bag. Noir fans would most likely appreciate this more.

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Rameycreek said on Feb 22, 2009 about the Hardcover edition | Add your feedback

The characters in this book seem so real, I can almost see them doing what they're described as doing before I read the description in the book. It's the only book I can remember feeling that about. Exciting, absorbing, thought-provoking in its conclusion.

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sid_rw said on Jun 30, 2008 | Add your feedback