The novel that invented the American detective story, unabridged.
A woman walks into Sam Spade's San Francisco office with a story that is not quite true and asks him to follow a man. Within twenty-four hours his partner is dead, the police want a word, and a fat man on the Pacific coast is looking for a small black bird.
Over four days Spade lies to almost everyone he meets, takes money from anyone who offers it, sleeps with the wrong woman, and arrives at a moral choice that every hard-boiled hero since has been measured against.
Hammett spent eight years as a Pinkerton operative before he wrote this, and it shows in every page. There are no flashes of brilliance here. Spade works. We are never told what he thinks or feels — we watch him from the outside, exactly as a witness would, and we read the man through what he does and what he pointedly does not say.
That technique was startling in 1930 and it is the engine of the book's strange power. It also makes it superb listening: Hammett wrote almost entirely in surface, gesture and speech, so a narrator has nowhere to hide and nothing to explain.
Includes a new foreword by Alexander Kross on Hammett, the Pinkerton years, and why the modern crime novel begins here.
