Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

Lee Horsley (Lancaster University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.3: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1930

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

In The Maltese Falcon, in place of the nameless Continental Op of Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, Dashiell Hammett created, as his protagonist, one of the most famous examples of the private investigator. The “blond satan” with the wolfish grin, Sam Spade, is a loner whose audacity and individualism are the product of a thoroughgoing distrust of conventional social arrangements and familiar pieties. Spade's cynical sense of the world is epitomised in the story he tells Brigid of the strange affair of Flitcraft, who abandons his perfectly ordinary family life after he has nearly been killed by a falling beam: this exposure to life's randomness leads Flitcraft to leave behind his orderly existence, and to drift …

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1012 words

Citation: Horsley, Lee. "The Maltese Falcon". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 October 2001 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=251, accessed 24 November 2024.]

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