Flashback Friday: The Maltese Falcon (A Sam Slade Novel)

$11.99 Nook Book

Widely recognized as the best hard-boiled detective novel ever written.

Dashiell Hammett's iconic, influential, and beloved The Maltese Falcon is a coolly glittering gem of a hard-boiled detective novel that continues to haunt crime fiction lovers since it was first published in 1930.

Hailed as one of the greatest mystery writers of all time, Dashiell Hammett was one of the pioneers of hard-boiled detective stories.

The Maltese Falcon tells the story of a shopworn San Francisco private eye Samuel "Sam" Spade, who gets hired by a beautiful young woman, Miss Wonderly, to follow a man named Floyd Thursby.

Spade and his partner Miles Archer take the job, but later that night, Archer is found murdered, shot to death. A few hours later, Thursby is also killed, and Spade is in the frame as a suspect. Sam Spade finds out that it is all about the title object, a foot-high black statuette of unknown but substantial value.

The Maltese Falcon is still widely available both in print and electronic versions. If you've never read it, maybe it's time you did.

You can get a Nook Book version of the original novel at Barnes & Noble for $14.99. Or if you want to save a few bucks, and you don't mind lining the pockets of an opportunist making money by exploiting the work of someone else, you can buy the Kindle version knock-off  for $3.55, that was published after The Maltese Falcon fell into the public domain.

Don't look for it in the mystery & thrillers fiction section, however. The opportunist who republished the novel as an eBook on Amazon, managed to get Amazon to categorize the Kindle version in the non-fiction memoirs & biographies and true crime categories because it helps the book rank much higher in the Amazon store than it would if properly categorized. It's always about the money isn't it?