The Maltese Falcon

Send us Fan MailMy top noirs are Double Indemnity and Out Of The Past, in that order, but Falcon is special. Right out of the hard-boiled school of writing, the character of the unstoppable but human private detective as a noir mainstay, one of the more fatale of the femmes in the genre, the moody lighting and framing, the inevitability of the conclusion of a twisted scheme. Hey, all it lacks is a voice-over and flashbacks! Oh well. Falcon launched from one-time Pinkerton agent Dash Hammett’s typewriter in 1930. Run as a serial in the classic Black Mask pulp magazine, it was later published as a detective novel by Knopf. Hammett was often a denizen of San Francisco, setting the novel there and taking his given first name, Sam, for the name of his protagonist, Sam Spade. Hammett is often contrasted with a hard-boiled, slightly later contemporary, Raymond Chandler, whose own detective Phillip Marlowe was set irrevocably in LA. Chandler was more of a florid descriptor of the LA scene, while Hammett’s prose was exceedingly spare, with little of the setting of San Fran or deep details of the background of the story revealed. However, this made Hammett’s work perfect for a screenplay. Website and blog: www.thosewonderfulpeople.comBluesky: @wonderfulpeople.bsky.social