A fine first edition, THE MALTESE FALCON, 1930

A fine first edition
The Maltese Falcon, 1930
HAMMETT, Dashiell (1894-1961). The Maltese Falcon. New York: Knopf, 1930.

A fine copy of the first edition. The Maltese Falcon introduces private-eye Sam Spade and the mysterious "Miss Wonderly" as they pursue the fabled statuette. While loosely informed by Hammett's own experiences as a private detective for the Pinkerton Detective Agency in San Francisco, the author always maintained that Spade was fictional. In his introduction to the 1934 edition, he wrote: "Spade has no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and in their cockier moments thought they approached." Layman A3.1a.

Octavo. Original publisher's cloth (some toning to spine and extremities; some offsetting to endpapers).

Pre-Lot Text
THE SCOTT GREENBAUM COLLECTION OF LITERARY FIRST EDITIONS