Hot on the heels of the success of his first two back-to-back novels featuring his unnamed Continental Op, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, both released in 1929, Hammett decided to switch main-character gears in 1930 and created in Sam Spade what many argue is the quintessential — if not the authoritative — literary hard-boiled detective.

And while Hammett would later reuse the character in four short stories, so singular is Spade that Hammett only penned one full-length novel featuring him as protagonist: this one.

First serialized in five parts in Black Mask magazine from September 1929 to January 1930, Hammett’s loving gift to pulp enthusiasts, The Maltese Falcon, was released in novel form on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1930.

In the 1934 rerelease of the book, Hammett said of his creation: “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. For your private detective does not — or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague — want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent bystander, or client.”

In an interesting creative choice, if not an *ahem* novel one, Hammett chose to tell this story entirely in external third-person narrative, often called the “camera-eye perspective,” meaning there is a total lack of interiority — there is no description whatsoever of any character’s thoughts or feelings, only what they say and do, and how they look, essentially making the narrator a recording device, capturing only what can be seen or heard — which makes The Maltese Falcon one of the first, if not the first, modern full‑length novels to strictly sustain that point of view throughout.

And, yes, earlier writers did experiment with objective, behavior‑only narration, but mostly in short fiction — Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 short story “The Killers” being but one example — however, Hammett was the first to maintain the discipline cover-to-cover in a novel.

Now, as for the text, we’ve trimmed some hyphenated words so they read a bit easier: good-bye is now goodbye, phone-book has become phonebook, and so on. Inversely, we’ve done the same with words that were once two but are now one: good night is now goodnight — and I’m not sure why Hammett rendered Hongkong as a single word, but we have retrofitted it with its modern usage: Hong Kong.

And, after researching nearly every version of Falcon currently available, I feel confident in saying that our edition is the most annotated version currently in existence, with 200+ footnotes to provide clarity, context, and commentary where necessary, especially due to the many slang terms that Hammett peppers throughout the story.

Additionally, Hammett used several real San Francisco locations in this story, and invented some fictional locations inspired by real locations, so we have been meticulous in identifying if all of those locations still exist today, if they’ve survived as originally identified in the story, or if they have been converted into something else, along with all of the original or current addresses for each, so that, utilizing our footnotes, you can craft your own walking tour (or virtual Google Maps tour) of Hammett’s San Francisco.

Finally, let’s talk cover art: when I first approached this book, I imagined that I would create my own falcon for it — you know, make my mark, sear my signature — but after cycling through myriad falcons, I defaulted to the OG falcon that first appeared on the book’s dust jacket in 1930. There’s just something about that falcon — its style, its attitude — I can’t create one better, so what’s old is new again, which is fitting because old-is-new is the Heathen Editions way!

Sadly, the original art went uncredited and, to this day, no one is quite sure who did the work, but to whomever that artist was, I just want to say: excellent work — for it, like Sam Spade himself, is and will forever be timeless . . .

Sheridan Cleland
Co-Heathen
April 2026

“The Maltese Falcon was one of the best books of its kind ever written. It struck the publishing world and the reading world — which is something entirely distinct from the literary world — like a thunderclap. Nothing has been the same since.” —John Crosby, New York Herald Tribune

“A knockout detective is Sam Spade.” —The Boston Globe

“We want to go on record as saying that this story is a marvelous piece of writing — the finest detective story it has ever been our privilege to read in book form, in any magazine of any kind, or in manuscript. Don’t miss it.” —Joseph Shaw, editor of Black Mask

“[Hammett] writes with a lead-pipe and poisoned arrows as coups de grace. He stands alone as ace shocker . . . And now The Maltese Falcon, a button-button-who’s-got-the-falcon? of San Francisco. It is everything you want . . . The writing is better than Hemingway.” —Ted Shane, Judge

“The sheer force of Hammett’s hard, brittle writing lifts the book out of the general run of crime spasms and places it aloof and alone as a brave chronicle of a hard-boiled man, unscrupulous, conscienceless, unique.” —John G. Neihardt, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“The best detective story America has yet produced.” —Alexander Woolcott

“There are detective-story writers, and then there is Dashiell Hammett. I can think of no one in the world who is his match . . . The book is written with the snap and bite of a whiplash . . . The Maltese Falcon has a thousand virtues, of observation, of detail, of nuance, and of effect.” —Elrick B. Davis, The Cleveland Press

The Maltese Falcon

• Retail: $14.95
• ISBN-10: 1948316625
• ISBN-13: 9781948316620
• Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.58 inches
• Weight: 11.2 oz

• Retail: $24.95
• ISBN-10: 1963228626
• ISBN-13: 9781963228625
• Dimensions: 8.75 x 5.75 x 0.75 inches
• Weight: 15.5 oz

• Title Page
• Heathenry Flame
• Honorary Heathen Headshot: Dashiell Hammett
• End Title

• Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Private Investigators
• Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Hard-Boiled
• Fiction / Crime