Hammett, Dashiell | The Maltese Falcon, first edition in dust-jacket

Works from the Collection of Jean Hart Kislak

Hammett, Dashiell

The Maltese Falcon. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1930

8vo. Title-page printed in black and dark teal. Publisher's light grey cloth, spine blocked in black and blue, upper board stamped with falcon design in blue and ruled in black, lower board with Borzoi Books imprint in lower right corner, top edge blue; light browning to extremities, spine just fraying at tail-piece. Later state dust jacket, priced $2.50 on the front flap; one light crease to front flap, two unobtrusive stains to rear cover, one or two minute closed tears. 

First edition in dust-jacket of Hammett's third novel, an archetype in Detective Fiction

Hammett himself had first-hand experience as a private detective, having worked for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency between 1915 and 1922. Writing in the introduction to the 1934 edition of his novel, Hammett described his central character of Sam Spade as "what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not...want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with..."

The Maltese Falcon was serialized in five parts in Black Mask between September 1929 and January 1930, and was first published in book form in February the same year. It was reprinted seven times in its first year of publication. In 1931 Warner bought the rights to the novel for $8,500 after which it was adapted for the screen three times: in 1931, 1936 (titled Satan met a Lady) and 1941. The influence of Hammett's most significant novel has been enduring. Raymond Chandler drew strongly on Sam Spade to create his Philip Marlowe, and later remarked of the author: "he was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do...he wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before."