Tacoma Reads Together 2010

About the book | Community events | About Tacoma Reads | Conversation starters | About the author

The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett

The Tacoma Public Library is delighted to announce that Mayor Marilyn Strickland has selected The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett's classic (and groundbreaking) detective novel as the 2010 selection for Tacoma Reads Together, Tacoma's community reading initiative.

Why The Maltese Falcon? It's a terrific book and a great read. Yes, it is a detective novel—one of the best ever written. It’s also a brilliant literary work, as well as a thriller, a love story, and a dark, dry comedy. The only criticism one could offer Hammett’s private-eye classic is that it is so much fun to read, it might be hard the first time through to realize how deeply observed and morally serious it is.

About the book.

"I'm one of the few - if there are any more-people moderately literate who take the detective story seriously. I don't mean that I necessarily take my own or anybody else's seriously-but the detective story as a form. Some day somebody's going to make 'literature' of it ... and I'm selfish enough to have my hopes." 
          Dashiell Hammett in a 1928 letter to Blanche Knopf

Dashiell Hammett's career in writing began in 1929 when his story Red Harvest was published by Black Mask magazine. It was in pulp fiction that most of his early novels found their readers. The Maltese Falcon was also published by Black Mask as a five part serial from September 1929 through January 1930. Published after Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, it falls almost in the middle of his most widely published years, followed by The Glass Key and The Thin Man.  

As Hammett's great successor Raymond Chandler wrote in his essay "The Simple Art of Murder," Hammett "took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley.... [He] gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish."

The Maltese Falcon (1930), set the standard by which all subsequent detective fiction would be judged. Hammett's clean prose and sharp ear for dialogue produced an exceedingly readable novel with enough twists to keep the reader turning the pages in search of clues.

Hammett's Sam Spade is a rough and solitary man who worked outside of the law. A story of greed and betrayal, The Maltese Falcon went into seven printings in its first year. Sam Spade was immediately perceived as an icon. Reviewer Donald Douglas at the New Republic wrote that he evoked "the genuine presence of the myth... not the tawdry gumshoeing of the ten-cent magazine." Dorothy Parker at The New Yorker found him masculine, modern, and sexy.

Set in San Francisco, the story takes place over a six-day period, beginning Wednesday, December 5, and ending Monday morning, December 10, 1928. A tough, independent detective, Samuel Spade is hired by the beautiful and mysterious "Miss Wonderly," who walks into his office pleading desperately for help finding her sister. This bogus job gets Spade's partner, Miles Archer, and a thug named Thursby killed that same night. Though he disliked Archer, Spade's personal moral code dictates that "when a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it."

The police question Spade's innocence because he and Archer's wife were having an affair. After Miss Wonderly summons Spade to her hotel the next day, she confesses that her real name is Brigid O'Shaughnessy. Spade knows he's being manipulated but remains uncertain about Brigid's motives.
He returns to his office, where the shadowy Joel Cairo pays a surprise visit and offers five thousand dollars for the return of a jewel-encrusted black bird.

Spade soon realizes that O'Shaughnessy, Cairo, and Cairo's boss, Casper Gutman, are all seeking an elusive falcon statuette once owned by the legendary Knights of Rhodes. Sam Spade is not a man to shy away from a fight, but he is also clever enough to play along in order to find the falcon and prove himself innocent.
Who murdered Spade's partner? Where is the Maltese falcon? Is Brigid O'Shaughnessy as guileless as she claims? Will Spade risk himself to save her? Among many other things, The Maltese Falcon is about what it's like to want something-a fortune, a lover, or even respect-so bad that you would kill for it, give up a chance at happiness to get it, until finally the chase itself means more to you than what you're chasing.

The Maltese Falcon is a bomb that starts ticking in the first chapter, ticks faster as it goes, and doesn't detonate until the last pitiless page.

"Simplicity and clarity ... are the most elusive and difficult of literary accomplishments, and a high degree of skill is necessary to any writer who would win them. They are the most important qualities in securing the maximum desired effect on the reader."
                   - Dashiell Hammett, 1926

About Tacoma Reads Together
In the aftermath of the tragic event of September 11, 2001, Tacoma educator Patrick Erwin sought a way to bring the Tacoma community together to talk about the issues which appeared to keep the community apart. Remembering What if all Seattle read the same book?, a project begun by Seattle’s Nancy Pearl, Erwin met with Mayor Mike Crowley and others to suggest that perhaps Tacomans should be encouraged to come together to read, reflect upon, and then respond to the ideas and issues raised by one good book – one book which the entire community would be encouraged to read and discuss. In short order, Tacoma Reads Together was born.

This citywide community initiative, now in its 9th year, chose Harper Lee’s classic To Kill A Mockingbird for its first book. In the following years, the community was encouraged to read and discuss Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus and Arthur Miller's powerful play, The Crucible.

Each book is selected by the Mayor for the opportunities it presents to the Tacoma community to discuss critical community issues. These issues included racism and discrimination, the balance between the needs of the individual versus the rights of the State, immigration and cultural assimilation, and the ever-increasing role of science in our lives. The book selection (and the variety of programs that are scheduled for the first three months of each year) offers city residents an opportunity to come together with their friends and neighbors and talk. And listen. To learn. And to grow.

Tacoma Reads Together selections

2010   The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
2009   Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Live by Barbara Kingsolver
2008 - The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
2007 - The Pact by Drs. Sampson Davis, George Jenkins and Rameck Hunt
2006 - The Crucible, a play by Arthur Miller
2005 - Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley
2004 - How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents by Julia Alvarez
2003 - Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
2002 - To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee