The quintessential hard-boiled detective novel starring the enigmatic detective Sam Spade. The story starts when Sam and his partner Miles are contracted by a Ms. Wonderlay to find her sister. Miles, when tailing their lead Floyd Thursby, is found dead. Sam is now embroiled in a complex web of deceit, betrayal, and greed that centers on the legendary Maltese Falcon, a valuable artifact sought after by multiple parties.
A colourful cast includes the beautiful and cunning Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Ms. Wonderlay’s real identity), effeminate criminal Joel Cairo, gangster Casper Gutman and his vicious young enforcer Wilmer Cook. Everyone assumes that Spade knows all, and reveal nothing, but in reality, Spade knows next to nothing at all. Eventually he actually comes into possession of the falcon, almost entirely by accident.
In a twist, the bird is found to be a fake, and Gutman and Cairo head out of the country in search of the real bird. Spade pieces together the rest of the story and figures out it was Brigid herself who killed his partner; he turns her in to the police, who inform him that Gutman was killed by Wilmer, who he attempted to double-cross.
This book is a product of its times in many ways. The snappy dialogue and vivid descriptions haven’t aged well, and is sometimes near incomprehensible. The plot is often hard to follow, and I often was left wondering how Spade could even function when he spent more time talking tough than doing any actual detective work. More often than not, solutions just fell into his lap with little to no contribution from him. Why key people trusted him when he did little to earn that trust was also inexplicable.
To add to all this mess, he is having an affair with his dead partner Miles’ wife, and is actively avoiding her through most of the book. On the whole, this book is probably not worth reading. It might have been a trend-setter in its time, but it is thoroughly dated.