The Maltese Falcon
Seeing as how I’ve been on a mystery kick, I decided to read the next one in the Titans of the genre, which was the Maltese Falcon. Written 10 years before The Big Sleep and 10 years after The Man in the Brown Suit, I thought it fell in almost perfectly between the two. The noir and corruption isn’t as bad as in the Big Sleep, but the optimism present in Christie’s book is also not there.
As in almost all mysteries there is a McGuffin that everyone is chasing, the titular Maltese Falcon, said to be made of incomparable gold and precious gems. There is multiple deaths, multiple mysteries within mysteries, and intrigues within intrigues, and the detective, left to figure everything out.
Like most novels set in the noir style, there’s very little in the way of giving readers the chance to figure out the plot. Everything is explained at the end, and the star of the show is the hard boiled, the corruption, and the beginning of the desperateness of the situations. Where the Maltese Falcon differs in that from Chandler’s books, is that there’s much more daylight given in the book. Corruption is starting to set in, but hopelessness isn’t there yet. Everyone seems to have the chance to be happy, and there’s none of the fog that seems present in all of Chandler’s Marlowe’s books.
The plot moves along at a nice pace, and the characters are all different enough. Not everyone’s a hard boiled hard assed dead to the world person. And that makes the book different enough that I did finish it.
Highly recommended as a book that also defines the genre. I’ll review the movies when I get around to it.