The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett (New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Edition, 1992; first serialized in Black Mask magazine in 1929-30; book first published in 1930)
Join Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade as he unravels the mystery of “the maltese falcon” on the streets of San Francisco. This is mystery writing at its best.
Where Bush Street roofed Stockton before slipping downhill to Chinatown, Spade paid his fare and left the taxicab. San Francisco’s night-fog, thin, clammy, and penetrant, blurred the street. A few yards from where Spade had dismissed the taxicab a small group of men stood looking up an alley. Two women stood with a man on the other side of Bush Street, looking at the alley. There were faces at the windows.
Spade crossed the sidewalk between iron-railed hatchways that opened above bare ugly stairs, went to the parapet, and, resting his hands on the damp coping, looked down into Stockton Street.
An automobile popped out of the tunnel beneath him with a roaring swish, as if it had been blown out, and ran away. Not far from the tunnel’s mouth a man was hunkered on his heels before a billboard that held advertisements of a moving picture and a gasoline across the front of a gap between two store-buildings. The hunkered man’s head was bent almost to the sidewalk so he could look under the billboard. A hand flat on the paving, a hand clenched on the billboard’s green frame, held him in this grotesque position. Two other men stood awkwardly together at one end of the billboard, peeping through the few inches of space between it and the building at that end. The building at the other end had a blank grey sidewall that looked down on the lot behind the billboard. Lights flickered on the sidewall, and the shadows of men moving among lights.
Spade turned from the parapet and walked up Bush Street to the alley where men were grouped. A uniformed policeman chewing gum under an enameled sign that said ‘Burritt St.’ in white against dark blue put out an arm and asked: ‘What do you want here?’ – from The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
Related Websites
The Library of America Website
The Dashiell Hammett Tour, San Francisco
891 Post Street, San Francisco (Mark Coggins Website)
