Sam Spade's Hard-Knock Life

Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon is a very famous mystery written in the noir style.  It stars the cynical private detective Sam Spade, inspiration for so many hard-working, lonely detectives in novels today.  Spade and his partner are asked to help a woman find her sister, but things go wrong very quickly and Spade learns that no one is being very honest with him.  Everyone wants the Maltese Falcon, a beautiful stone bird of high value.  But no one knows where it is.  Except, perhaps, Sam Spade.

Obviously, this book has been on my radar for a long time, as it's a title that everyone knows.  I'm not sure exactly what motivated me to buy it - I think I was in a detective story phase and figured that I should read the mystery that everyone seems to know.  So I bought it and let it sit on my shelf for a couple of years and then managed to remove it from my TBR pile by renting it on audiobook from the library.

The audiobook I ended up renting was a production with a full cast and sound effects and everything!  It definitely helped me fit into the atmosphere of the book.  I felt as though I were back in the 1920s, in the golden age of radio, listening to my favorite serial on my way home from work.

There were some really great things.  For example, the book is very quotable, and the jokes are delivered in a very dry, sarcastic tone.  Also, the book just is noir.  The actor playing Spade had a very gruff voice.  He called women "sweetheart," and they responded.  He walked along the foggy streets of San Francisco.  The characters were hard to like, hard to trust, and willing to do almost anything to get what they wanted.  I can see how this story inspired so many others about cynical detectives that work for their own sense of justice, even if they're not always on the right side of the law.

While I can see why this book is so popular, I didn't love it.  To me, there were too many people for such a short book, and not one was developed fully.  We know nothing of their thoughts or motivations - only what they say and do to Spade.  It's hard for me to love a story when I don't feel any pull towards the characters.

Also, while I enjoyed the audiobook production a lot, it was a little confusing.  There were a lot of different actors, and at times it was difficult to differentiate between people's voices, particularly when there were a lot of people in the same scene.  Perhaps if it had been a longer book, I'd have had more time to learn each character's voice, but there were many characters, several had accents, and the whole book was only about 3 hours long, so there just wasn't enough opportunity.

While this isn't one for my keeper pile, I'm really glad I read it, if only to understand the mystery genre better. I hope to watch the movie adaptation, too, with Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade!