The Maltese Falcon

San Francisco, 1920s. Private detective Sam Spade and his partner, Miles Archer, take on a client who gives her name as Miss Wonderly. She wants a man called Floyd Thursby followed. By morning Archer is dead, and the police look at Spade as a suspect.

Spade starts working the killing himself and quickly learns that Miss Wonderly's name is false. Several dangerous people are hunting the same object: a black statuette of a falcon, reputedly covered in jewels and trailed by a long, bloody history.

The hunters are an odd set. Casper Gutman is fat and unfailingly courteous, Joel Cairo is perfumed, and Wilmer Cook is Gutman's young gunman. Brigid O'Shaughnessy is the real woman behind the invented name, and she lies for reasons of her own. Spade believes none of them and sets them against one another.

This is hardboiled crime fiction with a cynical, self-reliant detective, clipped dialogue and a morally murky city. It first appeared in the magazine Black Mask in 1929 and 1930, then as a Knopf book in 1930. The question that drives it is where Spade's loyalties finally lie.