The Maltese Falcon with Coda
Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon is more than a mystery: it is a seminal work that defined a genre, a tough, unflinching portrait of a hard-nosed private eye navigating a treacherous landscape, culminating in a shocking cliff-hanger that has left readers dangling for nearly a century.
What happened to the falcon?
The Poltroon Press edition of this classic detective novel supplies the answer with a new coda comprised of two linked short stories by Mark Coggins. Coggins, who is a photographer as well as a crime fiction writer, also contributes twenty-two scene-setting black and white photographs from modern-day San Francisco to illustrate the volume.
Prepare now to enter—or reenter—the world of Samuel Spade. A knight-errant on the fog-shrouded streets of 1920s San Francisco, he isn’t afraid to bend a few rules to meet his clients’ needs.
But he’s never had a client quite like the breathtaking Brigid O’Shaughnessy, a damsel in distress whose story doesn’t quite add up.
When Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, insists on handling the case himself—and promptly winds up dead—Spade becomes a prime suspect in his murder. Sucked into a whirlpool of deceit and double-cross, he must navigate a precarious path between the police and a shadowy cast of out-of-towners who’ve come to believe he can deliver a magnificent jeweled falcon from the time of the Crusades.
New Introduction
The Maltese Falcon is the lodestar in the firmament of hard-boiled detective fiction. A new essay by Randal S. Brandt, the curator of the California Detective Fiction Collection at U.C. Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, elucidates the reasons why.
Mapback
The dust jacket incorporates a “mapback” showing crime-scene locations from both Hammett’s novel and the stories from the coda.
Video Tour
Illustrations
Black and white photographs of locations described in the novel and the coda start each chapter. These include interior shots of Sam Spade’s (and Dashiell Hammett’s) apartment at 891 Post Street.
Stockton Tunnel
891 Post Street #401