The Maltese Falcon (29 page)

5.   “By Gad, sir, you’re a character” [
this page
], says Gutman, laughing, when Spade suggests making Wilmer the fall-guy. Is the Spade-Gutman relationship one of justice versus corrupt wealth or one of equals competing for the same prize? How does Gutman’s sophistication and erudition reveal another side of Spade?

6.   When Spade returns to the office in the last scene, Effie does not greet him with her usual verve. What has happened to the breezily affectionate bond between them? What is Effie’s relationship to Brigid? Will Effie forgive Spade, or do we not know enough about her to make predictions?

Comparing Hammett, Chandler, and Thompson:

1.   How does the way Chandler uses Los Angeles in
The Long Goodbye
resemble or differ from the way Hammett uses San Francisco in
The Maltese Falcon
? To what extent is this the result of their individual writing styles? Does Thompson resemble either writer with his descriptions of the West Texas oil country in
The Killer Inside Me
? How important is setting in each of these novels?

2.   Although they were brilliant innovators and stylists, Hammett and Chandler were writing for a genre that dictated resolution of the plot. Thompson, on the other hand, in
The Killer Inside Me
creates a plot rife with ambiguity. What element or elements of his predecessors’ style does Thompson retain? Could Thompson have written
The Killer Inside Me
without the models of Hammett and Chandler?

3.   Thompson inverts traditional crime fiction by writing from the viewpoint of the criminal instead of the detective. In the novels of Hammett and Chandler, how different is the criminal from the detective? Where do Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe fall in their respective, or mutual, attitudes toward authority and law?

4.   How does the characterization of women in
The Maltese Falcon
compare with those in
The Long Goodbye
? Is Brigid O’Shaughnessy the equivalent of Eileen Wade? Is Effie Perine the equivalent of Linda Loring? What do the differences in these characters tell you about the hard-boiled style? About the authors?

5.   Chandler and Thompson write in the first person, and Hammett uses the third person in
The Maltese Falcon
. How would each of these novels have been affected—for better or worse—if the voice had been reversed? What are the inherent advantages and/or limitations of writing in the first or third person?

Dashiell Hammett was born in St. Marys County, Maryland, in 1894. He grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. He left school at the age of fourteen and held several kinds of jobs thereafter—messenger boy, newsboy, clerk, timekeeper, yardman, machine operator, and stevedore. He finally became an operative for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency.

World War I, in which he served as a sergeant, interrupted his sleuthing and injured his health. When he was finally discharged from the last of several hospitals, he resumed detective work. Subsequently, he turned to writing, and in the late 1920s he became the unquestioned master of detective-story fiction in America. During World War II, Mr. Hammett again served as a sergeant in the Army, this time for more than two years, most of which he spent in the Aleutians. He died in 1961.

THE DAIN CURSE

The Continental Op is a short, squat, and utterly unsentimental tank of a private detective. Miss Gabrielle Dain Leggett is young, wealthy, and a devotee of morphine and religious cults. She has an unfortunate effect on the people around her: they have a habit of dying violently. Is Gabrielle the victim of a family curse? Or is the truth about her weirder and infinitely more dangerous?
The Dain Curse
is one of the Continental Op’s most bizarre cases, and a tautly crafted masterpiece of suspense.

Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72260-1

THE GLASS KEY

Paul Madvig was a cheerfully corrupt ward-heeler who aspired to something better: the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dynasty of political purebreds. Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him? Dashiell Hammett’s tour de force of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness.

Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72262-5

THE MALTESE FALCON

A treasure worth killing for. Sam Spade, a slightly shopworn private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. A perfumed grafter named Joel Cairo, a fat man named Gutman, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. These are the ingredients of Dashiell Hammett’s coolly glittering gem of detective fiction, a novel that has haunted three generations of readers.

Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72264-9

NIGHTMARE TOWN

Laconic coppers, lowlifes, and mysterious women double-and triple-cross their colleagues with practiced nonchalance. A man on a bender awakens in a small town with a dark mystery at its heart. A woman confronts a brutal truth about her husband. Here is classic noir: hard-boiled descriptions to rival Hemingway, verbal exchanges punctuated with pistol shots and fisticuffs. Devilishly plotted, whip-smart, impassioned,
Nightmare Town
is a treasury of tales from America’s poet laureate of the dispossessed.

Fiction/Crime/978-0-375-70102-3

RED HARVEST

When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty—even if that meant taking on an entire town.
Red Harvest
is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain.

Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72261-8

THE THIN MAN

Nick and Nora Charles are Hammett’s most enchanting creations, a rich, glamorous couple who solve homicides in between wisecracks and martinis. At once knowing and unabashedly romantic,
The Thin Man
is a murder mystery that doubles as a sophisticated comedy of manners.

Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72263-2

WOMAN IN THE DARK

On a dark night a young woman seeks refuge at an isolated house. She is hurt and frightened. The man and woman who live there take her in. But their decency is utterly unequipped to deal with the Woman in the Dark, or with the designs of the men who want her. First published in installments in
Liberty
magazine and now rediscovered after many years,
Woman in the Dark
shows Dashiell Hammett at the peak of his narrative powers.

Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72265-6

ALSO AVAILABLE:
The Big Knockover
, 978-0-679-72259-5
The Continental OP
, 978-0-679-72258-5

VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com