In the Library
The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett, 1930
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 20
- Length
- Length 67k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
I won't play the sap for you.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
About the book
Sam Spade's jaw juts out like something built rather than grown, and Dashiell Hammett, once a real Pinkerton detective, never tells you what is happening behind it. That refusal is the whole invention, a hardboiled voice reporting action the way a camera would, feeling withheld until it breaks loose. His partner is shot dead in a San Francisco alley, and the case pulls Spade toward Brigid O'Shaughnessy, a client who lies so fluently that even falling for her, he can never trust a word she says. Circling them both is Kasper Gutman, seventeen years into hunting a jeweled black bird, and Joel Cairo, who pulls a pistol on Spade and loses it in seconds. When the falcon finally surfaces, it is lead under gilt, worthless, and everyone who killed for it has killed for nothing. Spade lists, coldly, every reason he has to hand her over for his partner's murder instead of keeping her, and the worst reason is the truest: he can never be sure she would not do the same to him. He hands her over anyway.