![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() He also hand - rolls his cigarettes, which like pipe - tamping adds a casual deliberation to scenes, insouciance that cannot be conveyed as well by somebody just taking one out of a pack. ![]() And Sam Spade, described as a 'blond Satan', built like an Easter Island statue and defined by the letter V as to his facial features, is not Bogart, quite - he is also somewhat sleazy, not just hard - boiled but venal. Most scenes hold up remarkably intact in spirit, including word - for - word reproduction of the dialogue. Hence the movie necessarily crops a lot out of the sub - plots and other incidentals. Like all Hammett books, it is short (some 200 pages), but its terse and economical style contains enough detail for a much longer novel. The mood of this masterpiece puts it right up there with the best of the 'noirs' (cf. One of the early but hardly surpassed (if ever) hard - boiled detective stories. This mystery became John Huston's classic movie with Bogart, Lorre, Greenstreet, et al., and lifted dialogue intact from this book - that's how vividly written it is. Hammett's most famous detective is Sam Spade, who appears only in this novel and three rather trivial short stories produced on demand from his publishers. Hammett, Dashiell - The Maltese Falcon (1930) ![]()
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