1/8/2023 0 Comments Maltese falconA choice copy of one of the defining novels of twentieth-century detective fiction. Title page printed in black with falcon in blue. Text clean and fresh.įirst edition, fourth printing. Housed in a custom blue quarter goatskin clamshell box. In original expertly restored yellow dust jacket with falcon statue and hand grasping valuables on the front cover, and ads for Dain Curse and Red Harvest priced at $2.00 on rear cover, price clipped (as nearly always). Black topstain, fore-edge machine deckle. Original grey cloth, falcon design in blue on front board, spine stamped in blue and black, publisher's device on rear board. Although the book didn't live up to Knopf's hopes, selling about a tenth the copies A FAREWELL TO ARMS did the previous year, it was vaulted to icon status with the 1941 noir film starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor. It was first published in a series of five issues of THE BLACK MASK beginning September 1929. THE MALTESE FALCON captures many of the key traits of the genre, including a gritty setting (in this case 1920s San Francisco), morally ambiguous characters where no one seems entirely "good, " and an isolated, lone-wolf protagonist who lacks the gentlemanly demeanor of famous antecedents like Sherlock Holmes. Hammett, a former Pinkerton detective, was one of the primary pioneers of a distinctly American strain of detective fiction: the hard boiled. First edition in book form of the hard-boiled classic, in which private detective Sam Spade chases a valuable artifact with the femme fatale Brigid O'Shaughnessy, rarely found with the original dust jacket (here professionally restored).
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