The Maltese Falcon

Sam Spade, Private Eye! Whether you are a Bogart fan or have read The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, you will know about the great hard-boiled detective saga set in 1920s San Francisco. The story is now such a big part of the City that there are tours where you can wander the streets where it is set; a wealthy fan acquired the apartment, where the book was written, which was the home of the fictional detective. The author of The Glass Key, The Thin Man (which were made into the popular Nick and Nora Charles movie franchise), Red Harvest and other great America novels (published by Knopf), Hammett also wrote screenplays which defined the Film Noir genre. Hammett worked as a Pinkerton detective and served in World War I, but contracted Spanish Flu and TB in 1918. The only good outcome was he married his nurse. He lived at 891 Post Street in San Francisco while working as an ad man and this is the home of his fictional detective. Like many aware writers he was a card-carrying member of Antifa (! LOL) and re-enlisted to serve in World War II. He was blacklisted by the McCarthy Congress and went to prison rather than give up names of any of his associates. Despite his great works, he died broke, of lung cancer in 1961.

Mark Coggins is a contemporary detective writer and photographer. Poltroon Press published his first two detective novels, The Immortal Game and Vulture Capital. These are part of the August Riordan series which have been lauded by the Shamus and Barry Awards. In 2021 Poltroon published a monograph of his photographs called Street Stories. Now Coggins has collaborated retroactively with Hammett to set the stage for a reprint of his masterpiece. This edition includes 22 scene-setting photos of locations in the book, and for those who wonder whatever happened to the bejeweled falcon of the title, Coggins adds a literary coda. Detective fiction scholar Randal Brandt provides an introduction to this timeless work.