The Maltese Falcon Summary: Hammett's Hardboiled San Francisco Classic
What The Maltese Falcon is about
Dashiell Hammett's novel was serialised in the pulp magazine Black Mask from the September 1929 issue and published as a book in 1930. It is set in San Francisco and follows a private detective named Sam Spade, who works in partnership with Miles Archer.
A beautiful client calling herself Miss Wonderly hires the pair to follow a man called Floyd Thursby. Her story is that Thursby has run off with her sister. Archer takes the first shift and is found shot dead that night. Thursby is killed soon after, and the police start looking hard at Spade, partly because he had been sleeping with Archer's wife, Iva.
Miss Wonderly turns out to be Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and the case has nothing to do with a missing sister. She is chasing a black statuette of a falcon. So are several other people, and none of them will say plainly what they know. The bird itself, as Casper Gutman eventually explains, was made of gold and jewels by the 16th-century Knights of Malta as a gift to the King of Spain. Pirates took it. It passed from owner to owner, and at some point someone coated it in black enamel to hide what it was worth.
Hammett tells the whole thing from outside the characters. There is no access to anyone's thoughts or feelings, only what they say, what they do and how they look. The reader works out motive the same way Spade does, by watching. That flat, external method is a large part of why the book is held up as a founding text of the hardboiled genre, which Hammett did more than most to popularise.
The main characters
Sam Spade. The detective, and the book's moral problem as much as its hero. He is unsentimental, often unpleasant, and keeps his own counsel. The morning after Archer's death he tells his secretary to have the office door repainted to read simply "Samuel Spade".
Brigid O'Shaughnessy. An acquisitive adventuress who begs Spade for protection while telling him as little as she can get away with. She stalls, she kisses him, she vanishes, she calls for help and then sends him on a pointless errand across town.
Casper Gutman. The fat man who has spent years tracing the falcon. He found it with General Kemidov, a Russian exile in Constantinople, and hired O'Shaughnessy to get it for him. He is courteous, talkative and entirely willing to drug a man he is negotiating with.
Joel Cairo. An effeminate criminal brought into the job by O'Shaughnessy, now pursuing the falcon on his own account.
Wilmer Cook. Gutman's young gunman, vicious and easily provoked.
Effie Perine. Spade's office secretary, and the one person in the book who seems to act out of plain decency. She believes O'Shaughnessy "is all right" and that Spade should help her. She even hides her at her own home.
The themes
Greed runs through everything. The falcon is valuable, and the value is enough to explain several deaths and a great deal of lying. Yet the statuette has been painted black precisely so nobody can see what it is. That is the book's central joke about wealth: the object everyone is killing for looks like nothing at all.
Then there is the question of what Spade owes anyone. He did not like Archer and had been sleeping with Archer's wife. He is drawn to O'Shaughnessy and sleeps with her. Neither fact settles what he will do. The novel keeps asking whether a man who is this compromised can still deliver anything you could call justice, and whether a private code is worth having if it costs you the thing you want.
Corruption sits on every side. The police suspect Spade. The District Attorney builds a theory around a Chicago gambler, Dixie Monahan, who had employed Thursby as a bodyguard in the Far East. Red herrings pile up. Nobody in the story is simply honest except the secretary.
How it ends (spoilers)
A wounded ship's captain staggers into Spade's office with a package and dies. The falcon is inside. Gutman, Cairo and Wilmer are waiting with guns in Spade's apartment, and Gutman offers 10,000 dollars for the bird. Spade argues that someone must be handed to the police for the killings, knocks Wilmer out in a scuffle, and Gutman agrees to give the boy up.
Then Gutman scratches the statuette and finds it is a fake, either a decoy made by Kemidov or proof that the legendary falcon was never real. Wilmer escapes in the confusion. Gutman and Cairo leave for Constantinople to look again.
Spade calls the police, then forces O'Shaughnessy to confess. She shot Archer, with Thursby's gun. She pleads that she loves him. Spade allows that he may care for her, then tells her he won't play the sap for her. He hands her over. The police arrive with news that Wilmer has shot Gutman dead.
Why it still matters
Almost every hard-edged detective written since owes something to this book. The clipped dialogue, the detective who is not clean, the plot driven by an object nobody can actually use: all of it starts to look standard afterwards, and none of it was standard before. The novel has been adapted for the cinema several times, which has kept Spade and the black bird in general circulation far beyond readers of crime fiction. It suits anyone who wants a crime story that refuses to reassure them about the people in it.
