Can you believe that I’d never read The Maltese Falcon? I certainly couldn’t, given that it’s, you know. A classic. And I even wrote a paper in college about the movie version. I even dug up a copy, which somehow managed to weather several changes of computer, just to peek at it (if you ask nicely, maybe I’ll post it). Intriguingly, it’s an analysis of the use of smoking in the film, with choice lines like: “The two enter a scuffle when Cairo attempts to search Spade’s office (Spade, of course, smoking all the while—Cairo is clearly not man enough to necessitate an extinguishment of the cigarette). At the end of the fight, Cairo takes something out of his billfold and begins to chew it—perhaps gum, hardly a masculine pursuit.”

Anyway, smoking in the film noir genre aside, there’s a reason this book is a classic, and it’s because it’s really, really good. Sam Spade is a character who really comes alive, and almost seems to walk off the page and start lounging on my furniture. I also loved the bits and pieces of 1920s San Francisco littered throughout the book.

The detective genre is, I grant you, quite venerable, but Hammett is a master of it. He created a compelling story with scenes and characters so interesting that it was made into a film, and parodied in a multitude of ways in the following decades. It’s a sparse, clean writing style, much like Sam Spade himself, and I’ve been reading so much flowery prose lately that it was awesome to just clear my head.

I finished The Maltese Falcon and felt like someone had just vacuumed all the cobwebs out of my brain, and run a dustcloth over it, just for good measure. It was…refreshing. And now I feel like I should be swanning about in a flapper dress with my hair plastered to my head and a single dashing curl.

Demographics:

The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett. Published 1929, 225 pages. Fiction.