I thought I had read The Maltese Falcon before, but after reading it this time, I am pretty sure I did not. I also do not think I ever saw the movie
The Maltese Falcon is a 1941 Warner Bros. film directed by John Huston, the film stars Humphrey Bogart as private investigator Sam Spade; Mary Astor as his femme fatale client; Gladys George; Peter Lorre; and Sydney Greenstreet in his film debut. The film was Huston's directorial debut and was nominated for three Academy Awards.
But I have a vague memory of seeing The Black Bird and really enjoying it (even though it got terrible reviews). It came out in 1975 and I would have been 14. I might have been a lot like middle, who never saw a movie she did not like, at that age.
Of the novel, The Maltese Falcon, Wikipedia writes:
"The Maltese Falcon is a 1930 detective novel by Dashiell Hammett, originally serialized in the magazine Black Mask. The story has been adapted several times for the cinema. The main character, Sam Spade, appears only in this novel and in three lesser known short stories, yet is widely cited as the crystallizing figure in the development of the hard-boiled private detective genre – Raymond Chandler's character Philip Marlowe, for instance, was strongly influenced by Hammett's Spade. Spade was a departure from Hammett's nameless detective, The Continental Op. Sam Spade combined several features of previous detectives, most notably his cold detachment, keen eye for detail, and unflinching determination to achieve his own justice."
"In 1998, the Modern Library ranked The Maltese Falcon 56th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century."
I expected to LOVE this book, because I like mysteries. Most of these books, I go in with no expectations at all. I usually do not know what the topic is and often nothing about the author. So, I suspect my expectations set me up a bit. As I mentioned above, I appreciated the book more after listening to the podcast.
I read this book for one of my discussion groups. And in the discussion we realized that those who read it with no expectations or even expecting to dislike it, really liked this book. Those of us who love mysteries, spy, detective type books and started in expecting to love it, were sort of disappointed.
So, low expectations liked it a lot, high expectations were sort of ambivalent in the end.
It was not a bad book, by any means, I enjoyed it. I agree it belongs on the 100 books lists because of its historical context. And the book/Sam Spade is referenced constantly in other works. When something is mentioned that often, it is nice to have read it and understand the significance.
The writing style is very different. I think I read somewhere that the pace is unusual for a modern reader (2000's). It is not difficult to understand, the style just sets it in the 1930's distinctly. So, maybe it was very modern and very American for the 1930's.
And even though I do not think I have ever seen the movie, I pictured Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre all the way through my listen.
