The Maltese Falcon » (Unabridged)

An elegant figure with a real background as a private eye, Hammett pioneered hard-boiled fiction with his plain-spoken dialogue and classic characters such as Sam Spade, Nick Charles, and the Continental Op. Opening the door for a slew of imitators, Hammett left an indelible mark with a relatively short body of work.

It's San Francisco, 1928, and Sam Spade is a wisecracking, womanising Private Investigator. Missing husbands and unfaithful wives are his usual stock-in-trade, but when the beautifully distressed Miss Wonderley calls he gets involved in a dangerous caper most people would run a mile from. Miss Wonderley asks Sam's partner, Miles Archer, to shadow Floyd Thursby, whom she maintains has kidnapped her sister. But then Archer is shot dead, and Miss Wonderley's story turns out to be a lie – just like her name, which is actually Brigid O'Shaughnessy. And Miss O'Shaughnessy keeps on lying. But one thing's for sure: she does know about the Maltese Falcon, an ancient statuette which has attracted more than one interested party. With a bunch of heavies at his elbow and the police on his tail, Sam needs to think fast if he's to outlive the person who killed his partner...Tom Wilkinson, Jane Lapotaire, Peter Vaughan and Nickolas Grace star in this stylish dramatisation of Dashiell...

New York Times Book Review

If the locution 'hard-boiled' had not already been coined it would be necessary to coin it now to describe the characters of Dashiell Hammett's latest detective story. . . there is plenty of excitement. -- Books of the Century; New York Times review, February 1930