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3.62 AVERAGE
3.62 AVERAGE
Definitely a great noir novel. It was very suspenseful, and you have to come to terms with the fact that there really is no hero in the story. Sam Spade is the manliest man to ever man. I think he's comparable to James Bond in a lot of ways but of course distinctly American rather than English. The book also has a lot of *great* dialogue that's pretty memorable./ One of the good ones was when Cairo irritably tells Spade that he always has a smooth answer for everything and Spade responds, "What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?" You just don't get dialogue like that anymore. Definitely recommend it to anyone who is a fan of the genre it's a pretty great example of it.
Every bit as great as it’s reputation. Great story, characters, and dialogue. It bears noting that John Huston’s version of this is pretty much perfect. I’ve never seen a film adaptation that was so close to the book and so brilliantly cast.
I think this is going on the shelf with The Catcher in the Rye-- as in, I'm not a white adolescent male and I would never understand. Also, the writing is horribly simplistic in an unbecoming Ernest Hemingway sort of way.
If you enjoy detective stories set in the 20's this is definitely a book for you. It was written well, but for me it was just okay. not really my genre of reading but I won't say the book was awful.
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
This book is so dated and so full of stuff I would never put up with (or even want to read) in more current novels. And yet, it has something that keeps me reading. Hammett was a terrific storyteller, and the story is a ripping good yarn. It's so easy to see why it was made into a movie - it almost reads like a movie. It is one of the quintessential examples of the early years of American detective fiction. I do wonder if it would have become the classic it has without the Bogart/Astor/Lorre/Greenstreet movie, which is such a classic (and which I love - in fact, I believe it's one of the few cases where I prefer the movie to the book). I do think that the more times progress, the harder it's become to read this book without a lot of snorting and eye-rolling at some of the more dated portions.
Cold, calculated, and an overall great story. Disappointed in the end, but it's one of those stories where the ending that needs to happen overtakes the ending I wanted.
dark
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Funny story...
This little piece of pulp fiction is just "pretty good" - which is to say that it's nothing to really put on the top of the 'to-read' pile. However, I decided to make it my literary companion for my trip to San Francisco, the city where the story is set. That gave the experience of reading it a little extra kick. Catching mentions of streets and neighbourhoods I was wandering around...sometimes even coming across those passages while I was sitting in said neighbourhoods. It brought the book to life in a way that even my memories of the film didn't and elevated it above just "pretty good".
...of course, it was impossible to read any of Sam Spade's lines without doing a bad Bogart impression in my head, which I wouldn't wish on anybody.
Oh, and chalking one up for a great adaptation of a book? It's kinda sad getting to the end of this tale and not getting "the stuff that dreams are made of"
This little piece of pulp fiction is just "pretty good" - which is to say that it's nothing to really put on the top of the 'to-read' pile. However, I decided to make it my literary companion for my trip to San Francisco, the city where the story is set. That gave the experience of reading it a little extra kick. Catching mentions of streets and neighbourhoods I was wandering around...sometimes even coming across those passages while I was sitting in said neighbourhoods. It brought the book to life in a way that even my memories of the film didn't and elevated it above just "pretty good".
...of course, it was impossible to read any of Sam Spade's lines without doing a bad Bogart impression in my head, which I wouldn't wish on anybody.
Oh, and chalking one up for a great adaptation of a book? It's kinda sad getting to the end of this tale and not getting "the stuff that dreams are made of"
For our October Book Club selection, we went Old School. Back to Dashiell Hammett and The Maltese Falcon. I'd never read this book, and it was a lot of fun. Even though it was published in the 1930s, it had its share of timeless moments. You can also see so many "detective story" moments that are copied in other books, but definitely not before The Maltese Falcon and probably not as well as Hammett wrote his passages. Adding a really cool facet to this book is it's based n San Francisco, about 70 miles from me, and so many of the locations were familiar to me. It added a lot to this story, IMO.