Dashiell Hammett. The Maltese Falcon. 1930.

I was wowed by Dashiell Hammett at first, but, after Raymond Chandler, reading Dashiell Hammett is like eating cardboard. They both plot a good detective novel, but Raymond Chandler then writes it. This novel feels like it is still waiting for Raymond Chandler to revise it. This is a great, serviceable mystery novel, but (you won't hear this from me very often) it's okay to see the movie first. There is no evocative language here whose effect would be undermined by a memory of the cinematic translation. I take it Dashiell Hammett really wanted the reader to asscoiate Sam Spade with Satan, but I'm not sure why this idea merited the clunky urgency with which it was applied. Elision used to interesting effect: in chapter 16, Sam Spade reveals to Effie Perrine information about the ship La Palma without the reader having known that he had investigated the matter, which kicks the novel's pace by disclosing a lot of information in a small number of pages. Then, of course, the unforgettable moment when the vividly-described seven-foot Captain Jacobi bursts into the office with the falcon, and falls dead on the floor. This chapter moves. Immediately afterward, in 7, the young, beautiful, drugged Rhea Gutman falls into Sam Spade's arms. She is wearing a shimmering yellow dressing gown and is described as a "small girl" twice in the sentence in which she is introduced. Although she can't walk and can barely speak, she is able to recite the exact address needed to get Sam Spade to the next passage. The scene is tittilating and irrelevant to the plot. She seems to leave the story as abruptly as she appeared. The address she recites is a house with nothing in it, a red herring, a dead end, but the chapter ends with Brigid O'Shaughnessy, femme fatale extraordinaire, running up to Sam Spade, and described with the word "panting" three times in one page, the third time with "both hands clasped to her breast." Later she will undress when he commands her to, so he can search her garments for a missing thousand dollar bill, but he does not check the obvious place.