
The Maltese Falcon
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Narrated by:
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Robertson Dean
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By:
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Dashiell Hammett
About this listen
The definitive masterpiece of the hard-boiled detective genre, The Maltese Falcon first appeared in the pages of Black Mask magazine in 1929 and was almost immediately acknowledged as not only a great crime novel but an enduring masterpiece of American fiction.
Tough, cynical PI Sam Spade - a man who, as his creator explained, is "able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with" - is hired by the story's irresistible femme fatale, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, to locate the client's sister by tailing her companion. Spade's partner, Miles Archer, takes on the assignment, and quickly both he and the man he was shadowing are murdered. As Spade pursues the mystery of his partner's death, he is drawn into a circle of colorful characters - all of them after a legendary statuette of a falcon fashioned long ago for King Charles of Spain.
Made of gold and encrusted with jewels, the falcon is worth a fortune. Missing for centuries, it resurfaced in Paris in 1911, covered in black enamel to disguise its value, and then disappeared again until it was traced to Constantinople - and now, it would seem, to Spade's own backyard.
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Story
This story follows an enigmatic private investigator drawn into a tangled web of deception and murder. A chance meeting with a mysterious man who has an uncanny affection for dogs leads the protagonist into a case filled with unexpected twists and hidden motives. As the layers of the mystery unravel, Chandler's signature blend of tension, wit, and vivid characterization keeps readers on edge until the final page. Set against the shadowy backdrop of 1930s Los Angeles, The Man Who Liked Dogs paints a vivid picture of a city teeming with secrets and danger.
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Classic Early Chamdler Pulp
- By Richard A. Nathan on 02-04-25
By: Raymond Chandler
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The Thin Man
- By: Dashiell Hammett
- Narrated by: William Dufris
- Length: 5 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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The Thin Man introduces Nick and Nora Charles, New York's coolest crime-solving couple. Nick retired from detecting after his wife inherited a tidy sum, but six years later a pretty blonde spies him at a speakeasy and asks for his help finding her father, an eccentric inventor who was once Nick's client. Nick can no more resist the case than a morning cocktail or a good fight, and soon he and Nora are caught in a complicated web of confused identities.
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RECORDING IS DEFECTIVE! MISSING SEVEN CHAPTERS!
- By David on 01-08-13
By: Dashiell Hammett
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The Glass Key
- By: Dashiell Hammett
- Narrated by: Stephen R. Thorne
- Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Paul Madvig was a cheerfully corrupt ward-heeler who aspired to something better: the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dynasty of political purebreds. Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him? Dashiell Hammett’s tour de force of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness. A one-time detective and a master of deft understatement, Hammett invented the noir crime novel.
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Pacing Quick & Plot was Goldilocks
- By Darwin8u on 05-16-12
By: Dashiell Hammett
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Best Cases of the Continental Op
- By: Dashiell Hammett
- Narrated by: Alison Belle Bews, Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Best Cases of The Continental Op, an original compilation of eight stories from Skyboat Media, the Op walks, stalks, and runs down the steep streets of San Francisco to solve crimes of blackmail, murder, stolen identities, and arson, and each story contains so many twists and turns you’ll be hooked until the very (surprising) end....
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Great read, and reading
- By JD DC on 10-13-22
By: Dashiell Hammett
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Honest Gain
- Dicey Cases of the Continental Op
- By: Dashiell Hammett
- Narrated by: Alison Belle Bews, Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 7 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Hot on the heels of Best Cases of the Continental Op comes Honest Gain: Dicey Cases of the Continental Op, another original compilation from Skyboat Media. The Continental Op is back on the case, tracking down thieves and murderers from the steep streets of San Francisco to the rough and tumble Wild West in Arizona. These six stories featuring the Continental Op show that this private eye is not afraid to get his hands dirty in order to get the job done right, or get himself hurt in the process.
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Honest Gain
- By Maurice Yves on 06-05-25
By: Dashiell Hammett
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The Moving Target
- A Lew Archer Novel
- By: Ross Macdonald
- Narrated by: Tom Parker
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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As private eye Lew Archer follows the clues from the canyon sanctuaries of the megarich to jazz joints where you can get beaten up between sets, The Moving Target blends sex, greed, misdirected love, and family hatred into an explosive crime novel.
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Unbearable
- By Bodiccea on 07-07-18
By: Ross Macdonald
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The Adventures of Sam Spade, Detective: Volumes One & Two
- By: Dashiell Hammett
- Narrated by: Howard Duff, Steve Dunne
- Length: 5 hrs and 42 mins
- Original Recording
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Steely. Seasoned. Smart-alecky. The storied San Francisco snooper is back! Share the exciting exploits of Dashiell Hammett's famous gumshoe through this thrilling 6-hour collection. Featuring all of the episodes from both our Volume One and Volume Two collections, Howard Duff and Steve Dunne star as Sam Spade in 12 madcap capers from 1946 - 1951. As crass as he is charismatic, this dynamic detective attracts a curious clientele - gentlemen who tend to drop dead and ladies who are drop-dead gorgeous.
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Bring Back Howard Duff
- By Jean G. Zorn on 06-14-14
By: Dashiell Hammett
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The Maltese Falcon
- By: Dashiell Hammnett
- Narrated by: Adam Sims
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Private detective Sam Spade is drawn into a dangerous web of intrigue when a mysterious woman named Brigid O'Shaughnessy hires him to find the elusive Maltese Falcon, a priceless statue that has been lost for centuries. As Spade navigates a world of deception, betrayal, and murder, he finds himself surrounded by ruthless criminals all vying for the treasure, including the menacing Gutman and the unpredictable Joel Cairo. With everyone playing their own game, Spade must stay one step ahead — but in this cutthroat world, even the sharpest detective can’t always trust his instincts.
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Black Mask Audio Magazine, Volume 1
- Classic Hard-Boiled Tales from the Original Black Mask
- By: Hugh B. Cave, Paul Cain, Frederick Nebel, and others
- Narrated by: Hollywood Theater of the Ear
- Length: 5 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In the1930s and '40s, Black Mask was the single most important magazine for the modern mystery field. Here writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Earl Stanley Gardner reshaped the established view of mystery fiction, creating the "hard-boiled" private eye. Now this series resurrects from those pages the toughest of tough detectives in sonic dramatizations from the award-winning Hollywood Theater of the Ear.
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Beware
- By joan on 10-27-11
By: Hugh B. Cave, and others
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Mildred Pierce
- By: James M. Cain
- Narrated by: Christine Williams
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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Mildred Pierce had gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness and determination. She used those attributes to survive a divorce in 1940s America with two children and to claw her way out of poverty, becoming a successful businesswoman. But Mildred also had two weaknesses: a yen for shiftless men and an unreasoning devotion to her monstrous daughter.
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Mildred -- you pierce my heart
- By P. Giorgio on 03-11-11
By: James M. Cain
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Indemnity Only
- V. I. Warshawski, Book 1
- By: Sara Paretsky
- Narrated by: Susan Ericksen
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In this gripping adventure - the first V.I. Warshawski mystery - America’s top private eye is tossed into a dangerous adventure when a seemingly straightforward assignment becomes complicated and deadly. Hired by a man who calls himself John Thayer, V.I.’s assignment is to find Thayer’s son Peter’s missing girlfriend. But when V.I. finds young Peter’s dead body instead, her client disappears.
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Back to the Beginning
- By Geoffrey Kragen on 11-22-11
By: Sara Paretsky
The Greatest Noir Detective Story of all time
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Saw the movie a dozen times
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The narration is outstanding.
Fun. exciting, intriguing look back to 1920s
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Sam Spade
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The narrator is battleship gray
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Well, there’s that film and, frankly, if that’s all you’ll ever know about The Maltese Falcon, you’re wonderfully served. But did you know, for example, that several Maltese Falcon films were made? But now about the novel. Dashiell Hammett wrote it in serialized form in the late 1920s, it was then published as a novel in 1930.
If you’re a screenwriter like me then this novel will feel to you like a screenplay. Screenplays are extroverted. In them you read what happens on screen, what is seen, what is said, what is heard. Novels, most often, are introverted. They’ll come with a lot of character musings, we get to be in their heads, read about their thoughts, get to know them beyond their external actions. Not so in script, there’s not a single line in a screenplay about what’s happening inside a character’s head - there is only what they say, what they do, how they act and react. In Hammett’s novel then, he does just that - there’s nothing about what characters feel or think. Made me feel right at home as a screenwriter and, frankly, John Huston (who directed and also wrote the screenplay) must have felt the same way.
Aside from the novel being very script-like, it was also startling to me just how faithfully the iconic film follows the novel. For much of the novel I could just see Bogie and Mary Astor and the rest of the amazing cast - the lines were there, word for word, the actions, the big things, the little things - seemingly all there. Obviously, a number of things had to be cut to pack it all into the film, but, again, faithful as can be.
However, that iconic line I mentioned in the opening paragraph? “The Stuff that dreams are made of” - that awesomely epic line - is not in the novel (legend has it that Bogie himself suggested that line). I’m sure Hammett didn’t mind that particular addition! Oh, since we’re on the topic of Humphrey Bogart - he was nothing like the Sam Spade Hammett had created in his novel. The original Sam Spade was a blond hulking pack of muscles with - get this - eyes that often appear yellow! The novel’s Spade is also a lot meaner, spiteful, occasionally petty, downright cruel. Bogart plays all of that to some degree, but he gave us a Sam Spade who’s tough as nails while, underneath, we can always feel that there’s a cool and mature soul with, ultimately, the heart in the right place.
Well then, should you ever feel like going down the Maltese Falcon rabbit hole, then know that watching the Huston/Bogart film is a great starting point. Now pick up the novel and know that it’ll be like watching the movie, but it still offers a few surprises - such as the “Flitcraft Parable” … at some point in the novel this feels like the author’s giving us a break, a time-out, an intermezzo from the twisted plot. Sam Spade hangs out with Bridget O’Shaughnessy and tells her the story of a man name Flitcraft, who, after almost being killed by a falling beam, just leaves his family behind and vanished. It certainly is an unusual element in The Maltese Falcon. Clearly, the story means something to Sam Spade, he likes that “He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”
And when you’re done reading the novel, then why not check out the other Maltese Falcon movie adaptations? The first was made in 1931 (10 years before the Bogie version) and pretty much vanished for many years because it censors denied approval as the film was considered to contain lewd elements. The second film followed in 1936 and was called Satan Met a Lady - it starred Bette Davis and was more of a comedic take on the novel. Another ‘funny’ adaptation came about in the seventies, a film called The Black Bird, starring George Segal as Sam Spade. I have to say, I haven’t seen these three films, but now that I’m writing about them, I really want to!
The ultimate private-eye noir classic
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The ending felt very anticlimactic compared to the film, as I was waiting to hear Sam Spade say, "It's uhh....the things dreams are made of."
Narration was excellent.
Fantastic narration. Story a star underwhelming.
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The story is solid, but the main character felt one-dimensional. Not sure if that was the reader or the author's choice to constantly talk about his "V-shaped mouth" and smiles/grimaces.
In favor of the book, I will say the noir atmosphere really paints a picture. I liked that. In favor of the reader, he does LOTS of recognizable voices--easy to follow.
But the pacing of this was off somehow.
Good Story--Mediocre Listen
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Absolutely Fantastic
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A classic
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