The Maltese Falcon

San Francisco private investigator Sam Spade takes on a new client calling herself Miss Wonderly, who wants a man named Thursby followed, and within a day his own partner, Miles Archer, turns up shot dead on the job Spade sent him to cover. Hammett quickly reveals the client's real name, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and pulls Spade into a wider hunt involving the nervous, cologne scented Joel Cairo and the enormous, courtly criminal Casper Gutman, all of them chasing a jeweled statuette of a falcon rumored to be worth a fortune. When the statuette finally reaches Spade's hands, delivered by a dying ship's captain who staggers into his office and collapses, it turns out to be a worthless fake, a fraud within the larger fraud everyone has been chasing. Spade works out along the way that Brigid herself killed Archer, using a gun that belonged to Thursby to make the murder look like something else entirely, and that she has been manipulating Spade with the same practiced charm she used on every man before him. Despite whatever he actually feels for her, Spade refuses at the novel's end to play the sap, as he puts it, and turns Brigid over to the police for Archer's murder rather than protect her the way she is counting on him to. Gutman, meanwhile, is shot dead by his own hired gunman, Wilmer, in the scramble that follows, leaving almost everyone chasing the falcon with nothing at all to show for it.

Hammett writes in a clipped, unsentimental style stripped of the genteel puzzle solving that had defined detective fiction before him, and Spade himself operates by a private, often ugly code rather than any conventional heroism; he is competent, occasionally cruel, and interested mainly in not being played for a fool. The novel reads fast and hard, its dialogue doing most of the actual work, and the moral ambiguity Hammett builds into Spade's final choice, walking away from a woman he wanted, was exactly what earlier detective fiction had never allowed itself.

Hammett had worked for years as a Pinkerton detective himself before turning to fiction, and he gave Spade his own given name, Samuel, later saying that Spade had no single real life original but was instead a kind of dream man, what most of the private detectives Hammett had actually worked with wished they could have been.