Free eBook: The Maltese Falcon
by Rob - May 25th, 2020.Filed under: ebooks.
Forget all those (cough, cough) rave reviews of my novel The Oppenheimer Alternative, coming out in eight days. Here are the reviews one of my top-five favorite novels got when it was first published in 1930: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. It’s a great read for a hot summer day!
“This department announces a new and pretty huge enthusiasm, to wit: Dashiell Hammett. Moreover, it would not surprise us one whit if Mr. Hammett should turn out to be the Great American Mystery Writer. The horsepower of Mr. Hammett’s pen must be sampled to be believed. In short, The Maltese Falcon is the best one … in Lord knows when. Read it and see.”
— Will Cuppy in The Herald Tribune
“If the locution ‘hard-boiled’ had not already been coined it would be necessary to coin it now to describe the characters of Dashiell Hammett’s latest detective story.”
— The New York Times
“First and foremost among the new thrillers comes Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. It stands out among the rest like a .45 among a flock of cap pistols. The story has plenty of action, a good plot, excellent characterization, and a startling denouement. Also, Mr. Hammett knows all about detective work, and the authors who really know that can be counted on the thumbs of one hand. This is not only probably the best detective story we have ever read, it is an exceedingly well-written novel. There are few of Mr. Hammett’s contemporaries who can write prose as clean-cut, vivid and realistic.”
— Walter Brooks in Outlook
The Maltese Falcon is in the public domain in Canada and many other countries (but not yet in the US, the UK, or the EU).
For those in countries with copyright terms of 50 years or less after the author’s death, here’s a FREE EBOOK VERSION
I took the text from Gutenberg Canada, cleaned up the formatting (smartening the punctuation and indenting the paragraphs), and added the cover from the first edition. FREE!
- ePUB (Kobo, Nook, Apple, etc.): hammett–the-maltese-falcon-rjs.epub
- MOBI (Kindle): hammett–the-maltese-falcon-rjs.mobi
Enjoy!
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