A San Francisco private detective, Sam Spade, takes a case from a frightened woman and is left with a dead partner and a group of criminals all chasing the same object: a jewel-encrusted statuette of a falcon. The story is told entirely from the outside, in what the characters say and do, with nothing of their thoughts.
Two stories that had already failed
In 1929 Hammett was 35 and living in a single room at 891 Post Street in San Francisco. He had worked as a Pinkerton operative from 1915 to 1922, and most of his fiction grew out of that work. He was married to Josephine Dolan, with two daughters, and supported them on what he earned from the pulps.
Hammett had left the Pinkertons after contracting tuberculosis, which he picked up during army service in the First World War. He could not go back to the work, and he wrote to earn a living. For a while in 1926 he wrote advertising copy for a San Francisco jeweller, Albert S. Samuels, before the Black Mask editor Joseph Thompson Shaw drew him back to the magazine. He dedicated Red Harvest to Shaw and The Dain Curse to Samuels.
He had already published those two novels, both serialised in Black Mask and then revised for Knopf. For The Maltese Falcon he did not start from an outline. In the introduction he wrote for a later edition, dated 24 January 1934, he said he could remember only three things about its invention: a strange rental agreement he had read about, and two of his own stories that he thought he had wasted.
“I thought I might have better luck with these two failures if I combined them with the Maltese lease in a longer story.”Dashiell Hammett, introduction to The Maltese Falcon, 24 January 1934
The book ran in Black Mask from September 1929 to January 1930 in five parts, and was published in book form by Alfred A. Knopf in 1930. Hammett revised it between serial and book, as he did with the others.
“Spade has no original”
The legend that grew up around the book says Sam Spade was modelled on a real detective Hammett knew. Hammett said otherwise. In the same introduction he wrote that Spade has no original: he is a dream man, the detective the operatives he worked with would have liked to be.
“Spade has no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and in their cockier moments thought they approached.”Dashiell Hammett, introduction to The Maltese Falcon, 24 January 1934
The other characters are a different matter. Hammett said he took most of his characters from real life, and the introduction lists their originals. Wilmer, the boy gunman, was a young bandit Hammett had encountered in Stockton, California, who called himself the Midget Bandit. Brigid O’Shaughnessy had two originals, one an artist and the other a woman who came to the Pinkerton office to hire an operative, and neither of them was a criminal. Gutman was a man suspected, foolishly, of being a German agent in Washington during the war. Cairo Hammett picked up on a forgery charge in Pasco, Washington, in 1920. Polhaus was a former captain of detectives. Effie, Spade’s secretary, was a woman who once asked Hammett to go into the narcotic smuggling business with her in San Diego.
So the myth is half right. Spade is invented. The people around him are not.
Told from the outside
The novel is told entirely in an external third person. There is no description of anyone’s thoughts or feelings, only what they say and do, and how they look. Even Spade’s reasoning is shown through his actions and his talk.
The prose is spare and concrete. Spade’s face is described in angles and colours, and the rooms he works in are given by their furniture. There is no commentary and no metaphor that tells you how to feel. The chapters are numbered in Roman numerals and each carries a short title, so the book moves like a sequence of scenes.
The book has 20 chapters. In chapter 7 Spade tells Brigid O’Shaughnessy the story of Flitcraft, a respectable man who walks out of his life after a falling beam misses him by inches, and ends up in a second life almost identical to the first. It is the one place where the book slows down and looks at why a man might change, and it is the key to Spade’s own code.
Where the title comes from
The title comes from the rental agreement Hammett mentioned. The Emperor Charles V granted the island of Malta to the Order of St John of Jerusalem, and the order’s annual tribute was a single Maltese falcon. Hammett had read about this and borrowed it for the story.
The statuette everyone chases in the book is fiction: a jewel-encrusted falcon supposedly made as a gift. The historical tribute was a bird. The object in the novel is a device to set the characters in motion, and the book is interested in the people chasing it.
The version that ran in Black Mask is not quite the version Knopf published. Hammett trimmed and tightened the serial, and the book that appeared in 1930 is the one everyone reads now. The five-part serial entered the public domain in the United States on 1 January 2025, and the revised novel on 1 January 2026.
The book is dedicated to Hammett’s wife, Josephine, as “To Jose”. By the time it appeared he was already involved with the writer Nell Martin, to whom he dedicated The Glass Key the following year. Hammett and Josephine had separated, but he continued to support her and their two daughters.
Spade’s address in the book is the same building Hammett lived in at 891 Post Street. Hammett scholars have argued over which apartment was his; there are no records of the exact one. The building is now a literary landmark.
