Set at the time of the original case, The Big Man’s Daughter revisits some of the haunts of the first book but this time from the point of view of Rita Gaspereaux, the 18 year-old daughter of the criminal mastermind known in the rackets as “the Big Man.” Contrary to Rita’s plans, she finds herself the inheritor of the burden of seeking after the Falcon.

Now, Fitzstephen is back with a new exploration of the Falcon-inspired, real-life-Hammett-grounded world. This fascination formed the core of my decades-spanning novel Hammett Unwritten, published by Seventh Street Books in 2013 under the pseudonym Owen Fitzstephen (a pen name derived for irresistible, narrative-related reasons). “They are based directly on people I knew or came across.” This suggested a question: might Hammett have based Sam Spade’s famous adventure on real people and a real statuette? The more I researched Hammett’s life-his work as a P.I., his rise to fame as an author, his subsequent, decades long writer’s block, his courageous stand against the Red Scare of the 1950’s-the more fascinated I became both with Hammett and the imaginative possibility that his life may have been entwined for many years with an “actual” black bird statuette that had served as the model for his fictitious one. “All of my characters are real,” Hammett said. Some years ago, I came across a quote from Dashiell Hammett in a 1934 edition of the New York Evening Journal that changed the direction of my own writing. For this reason, I demur when it comes to grounding the Falcon with any one definition, volunteering instead only to share here what the Maltese Falcon has come to mean to me and what I suspect it may represent for many other authors as well, even if they have never given a single thought to the mythical black bird. A great part of the enduring appeal of the Maltese Falcon is the ineffable quality these varied references suggest.

Or the Maltese Falcon may be regarded in terms of the narrative purpose it serves in the story that is, to use a term popularized by Alfred Hitchcock to stand for any object that entices characters and drives plot, a “MacGuffin.” Unattainable, perhaps, but irresistible. Additionally, the Maltese Falcon may be thought of as the statuette itself-an objet d’art of legendary repute and incalculable financial value. The Maltese Falcon may be thought of as a novel by Dashiell Hammett published in 1930 or as a trio of film adaptations produced between 19 (the middle of the three being a comedic mess renamed “Satan Met a Lady” and the last being the John Huston/Humphrey Bogart classic).

The maltese falcon book online