The Maltese Falcon

About a year ago I read Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, a famous 1920's hard-boiled detective novel. It was a quick read and good enough that I was interested in checking out Hammett's more famous The Maltese Falcon. As luck would have it Mrs. decided to buy The Maltese Falcon and read it first. Her review can be found here, but obviously she did not love the book.

My understanding of a hard-boiled detective novel is that it contains a "tough guy" detective, who is not only solving mysteries, but also confronting danger and violence at all turns. A Hardy Boys' mystery this is not. So at least in part I think this is why Mrs. was disappointed with The Maltese Falcon. She probably assumed it would be more like an Agatha Christie novel, but this isn't really a whodunit, but rather the story of Private Investigator Sam Spade working to bring to justice the criminals that we're introduced to.

For my part I actually thought The Maltese Falcon was better than Red Harvest. The story was more straightforward, but also kept you guessing at who to believe and what the resolution would be. Sam Spade flies by the seat of his pants and earns the "tough guy" label. The best part of the book is that you're never sure what he knows and what he's making up to extract more information from the criminals and other detectives he encounters.

Two of Mrs.' critiques were that the book had too many fight scenes and that she was bothered by the 1920's "lingo". As mentioned above, some violence is to be expected in a hard-boiled detective novel, and I didn't feel that there were any unnecessary fight scenes. As far as the 1920's lingo, I didn't even notice this so I'm not sure what Mrs. was referring to. Perhaps because the two books I read prior to this were written in the 1800's and set in London I just became immune to reading non-modern lingo. Anyway, Mrs. and I rarely have the same taste in books, so it's not a surprise that I would recommend a book that she disliked.

Next up: The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is my first book on Kindle