On January 1, 2026, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett entered the United States public domain. I got my copy of the book from Standard Ebooks.Most people who know The Maltese Falcon are probably more familiar with the 1941 movie starring Humphrey Bogart as Private Investigator Sam Spade. That film essentially set the tone for the Film Noir genre. And the tone of the book isn’t much different. This is fully a hard-boiled detective story. No one in the book is all that great, not even our protagonist Sam Spade. Maybe his secretary Effie Perrine. Maybe.Sam is a private eye who takes on a new client who wants a man tailed. His partner takes on the first night of the job and winds up dead. This sets off a whole series of events that drags Spade first into a murder mystery, then into a hunt for the titular macguffin. All along, Sam is chewing out people who could maybe help because of course they can’t really and Sam knows that because Sam’s been around and knows how things work so Sam’s going to do it Sam’s way.Luckily, Sam’s way leads to all sorts of interesting twists and turns through the plot because otherwise, he’d just be a jerk.Hammett is real good at painting this picture of the seedy underbelly of 1930 San Francisco and the smuggling and double crossing and murder going on. I love the implied cursing coming from Wilmer, the young bodyguard to the primary antagonist Gutman. There is so much in this book that feels like the more things change in how we look at crime, the more they stay the same.With the book being from 1930, or because Sam Spade is a jerk, or both, there’s a fair amount of casual sexism that Spade throws around to his secretary; to Iva, the widow of his dead partner with whom he was maybe having an affair; and to Brigid, the client whose case sets off the whole story. Honestly, it all kind of just fits back into Sam Spade is a jerk, but luckily one who gets himself into enough trouble that you enjoy seeing what happens next.Reading this one, I can definitely see the throughline in detective stories to books like The Dresden Files with that sort of jaded, hard-boiled protagonist.Overall, I had to keep reading this one to see where it turned out, but partially that was to see if Spade would get some comeuppance. This is definitely a book where a few times, I was rooting for the bad guy to just get one good swing in. Everyone was an asshole here.
