The granddaddy of San Francisco noir, with its dark streets and moody fog and cynics, is surely Dashiell Hammett’s masterpiece. Hammett drew on his experiences as an investigator with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to write The Maltese Falcon, which was originally serialized in Black Mask, a monthly pulp that cost 20 cents, at the start of the Great Depression. In this hard-boiled novel, tough-guy private investigator Sam Spade (who looks “rather pleasantly like a blond satan”) and his partner, Miles Archer, are hired by Brigid O’Shaughnessy, one of the original manipulative femmes fatales, who goes, at first, by the fake name of Miss Wonderly, to follow a man she says has taken off with her sister.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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What might have been a straightforward whodunit about a missing sister morphs into something more ambiguous, more intricate, and underpinned by a witty nihilism. When Archer and the sister’s supposed lover are killed, Spade becomes a suspect because he’d been sleeping with Archer’s wife. Nothing is as it appears. O’Shaughnessy’s true goal, it turns out, is to find the titular falcon statuette, a bejeweled gold object enameled in black to disguise its worth. Spade sleeps with her, while continuing to investigate and getting twisted up in the machinations of other shady characters who are also seeking the statuette and willing to commit murder to get it. The Maltese Falcon is a stone-cold classic of atmosphere, action, and intrigue.•
Anita Felicelli is Alta Journal ’s books editor and the author of How We Know Our Time Travelers, Chimerica, and Love Songs for a Lost Continent.
