The Maltese Falcon
The Maltese Falcon, mystery novel by American writer 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, a foppish Levantine whose gun gives him courage; the very fat and jovial but sinister Casper Gutman; and Gutman’s gunsel, Wilmer, who is eager to be feared. All of them are looking for the Maltese falcon, a fabulously valuable 16th-century artifact.
The concluding chapter, in which Spade explains his uncorrupt, even if sometimes accommodating moral code, is among the most influential pieces of writing in American crime fiction, and masculine antiheroes in the Spade mold came to dominate subsequent hard-boiled mysteries. The novel also established other classic crime fiction archetypes—in particular, the cunning femme fatale. The statue that lends its name to the book’s title is considered one of the best examples in modern literature of a MacGuffin, a narrative device that drives a story’s plot and motivates the characters despite being relatively insignificant to the story.
In 1941 The Maltese Falcon was adapted into a successful film by director John Huston, with a top-notch cast led by Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade.