The Maltese Falcon

The Maltese Falcon is a detective novel by the American writer Dashiell Hammett, published in 1930. It was first serialised in the magazine Black Mask in 1929, and it is one of the books that established the hardboiled style.

A woman comes into the office of the private investigator Sam Spade with a story about a missing sister and a man named Floyd Thursby, and Spade's partner, Miles Archer, takes the job of following him. By the end of the night Archer is dead, Thursby is dead, and the client has given a false name.

Spade then has to work out who killed his partner while several people hunt the same jewel-encrusted statue of a falcon. The characters around him all want the bird, and none of them can be trusted, and Spade has to work out how much to believe of what each of them tells him.

Hammett tells the story entirely from the outside, describing what the characters say and do without ever entering their thoughts, which became a hallmark of the style. It was adapted into a film in 1941 and has been filmed several times since.