Hammett, Dashiell | The Maltese Falcon in its rare jacket

Hammett, Dashiell

The Maltese Falcon. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1930

8vo. Title-page printed in black and dark teal. Publisher's light great cloth, spine blocked in black and blue, upper board stamped with falcon design in blue and ruled in black, lower board with Borzoi Books imprint in lower right corner, top edge blue; text block slightly shaken, areas of toning and light dampstaining, particularly to spine. Dust jacket, unclipped; restoration, most extensively to the spine and immediate area, with recoloration to text and a portion of the falcon, upper margin of panels restored with some recoloration, flaps reattached, rear panel lightly soiled, edges creased with appropriate restoration, altogether presents most attractively. Collector's clamshell box.

First edition, first issue, in the prized unclipped dust jacket.

The forerunner of American detective fiction and film noir, Hammett's hard-boiled tale of a jewel-encrusted falcon continues to captivate. Hammett himself had first-hand experience as a private detective, having worked for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency between 1915 and 1922. Writing in the introduction to the 1934 edition of his novel, Hammett described his central character of Sam Spade as "what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not...want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with..."

The Maltese Falcon was serialized in five parts in Black Mask between September 1929 and January 1930, and was first published in book form in February the same year. It was reprinted seven times in its first year of publication. In 1931 Warner bought the rights to the novel for $8,500 after which it was adapted for the screen three times: in 1931, 1936 (titled Satan met a Lady) and 1941. The influence of Hammett's most significant novel has been enduring. Raymond Chandler drew strongly on Sam Spade to create his Philip Marlowe, and later remarked of the author: "he was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do...he wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before."



Unlike Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Hammett’s drinking takes place in the gritty, urban landscape of Prohibition-era San Francisco. Hard liquor is chucked back by edgy characters against a noir background. The stiff drinks cut through the tense atmosphere of the book, and whiskey in particular reflects Sam Spade’s hardened, tough-guy persona.

REFERENCES:

Layman A.3.1.a