Today’s post is on The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. It is 213 pages long and is published by Orion. The cover is yellow with the falcon in profile. The intended reader is someone who likes classic mysteries, hardnosed detectives, and very surprising subplots. There is foul language, sex, and violence in this book. The story is told from third person close of Spade himself. There Be Spoilers Ahead.
From the back of the book- Sam Spade is hired by the fragrant Miss Wonderley to track down her sister, who has eloped with a louse called Floyd Thursby. But Miss Wonderley is in fact the beautiful and treacherous Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and when Spade's partner Miles Archer is shot while on Thursby's trail, Spade finds himself both hunter and hunted: can he track down the jewel-encrusted bird, a treasure worth killing for, before the Fat Man finds him?
Review- I am familiar with Sam Spade from Old Time Radio and so I had a very different idea about who Sam Spade is. The radio Sam Spade is not that bad of guy, a little rough around the edges but not a bad person. The Sam Spade in the novel is not that guy. Sam Spade in the novel is a very hard man. He is survivor of World War One but that is not what makes him. What makes him is how uncaring he is about others. In pursuit of his goal he does not care about anything else. He will use anyone, in every way to get what he wants. He is not bad but he is not a good guy. The plot starts out very general with a missing sister and then a murdered partner but it takes a very sharp left into the strange when the Knight Templers are added in. Of course nothing is as it seems and Spade does get his revenge and the foundation of a genre is the end goal.
I give this book a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.
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