The Maltese Falcon

In San Francisco, the private detective Sam Spade, cool, cynical and loyal to his own code, takes a case from a beautiful, nervous young woman calling herself Miss Wonderly. That night his partner, Miles Archer, is shot dead, and Spade finds himself among a gang of rival crooks, the perfumed Joel Cairo, the enormous, genial Casper Gutman and his young gunman Wilmer, all hunting for a jewelled statuette of a falcon made, legend says, by the Knights of Malta in 1539.

Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), who had worked as a Pinkerton detective, published the novel in 1930, and it shaped the hard-boiled detective story as we know it; the 1941 film with Humphrey Bogart is a classic. It entered the public domain in the United States in 2026. Compare Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.