The Maltese Falcon

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

“Dashiell Hammett's crime thriller and its hard-boiled hero Sam Spade influenced everyone from Chandler to Le Carr”

é ... The Maltese Falcon is the Hammett novel that jumps from the pages of its genre and into literature GUARDIAN
His name remains one of the most important and recognisable in the crime fiction genre. Hammett set the standard for much of the work that would follow INDEPENDENT
One of the foremost practitioners of the hard-boiled detective story THE SCOTSMAN
The dean of the school of hard-boiled fiction NEW YORK TIMES
He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used -- Raymond Chandler
He is master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer BOSTON GLOBE
The first fully "hard-boiled" hero in American letters NEW YORKER

After spells as newsboy, freight clerk, labourer, messenger, stevedore and advertising manager, Hammett became an operative of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. His experiences as a private detective laid the foundation for his writing career. He died in 1961.

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

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