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 […]
Tough Guys, Tough Talk, and Treasure
I’m a fan of film noir. For my money, it doesn’t get much better than Fred MacMurray “Hey, Baby”-ing Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity or Humphrey Bogart talking tough in The Maltese Falcon. But even though I’m a fan of the detective film and I love to read, I had yet to pick up anything by Dashiell Hammett, the master of the hard-boiled detective novel. Time to remedy that, I decided. The Maltese Falcon is the story of archetypal detective Sam Spade who, along with […]