The Maltese Falcon: Short Story

Private Detective Sam Spade and his partner, Miles Archer, are hired by the beautiful Miss Wonderly to track down her sister’s brutish boyfriend, Floyd Thursby. Spade is dubious, but the pair take the case, and when both Archer and Thursby wind up in body bags within twenty-four hours, Spade realizes that there is far more to this case than Wonderly had let on.

Sam Spade has long been considered the definitive example of a hard-boiled detective, and author Daishell Hammett effectively established the hard-boiled crime genre through his stories about detectives like Sam Spade and the hard-nosed Continental Op. "The Maltese Falcon" has been adapted several times, most famously in the 1941 film starring Humphrey Bogart in the role of Sam Spade.

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