My Book Review of ‘The Maltese Falcon’

The following is my vlogged book review of the highly-acclaimed novel, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. With text review included, so you can read along, if you like! 🙂

Hi Debbi Mack here, and I’m going to talk about The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. The Maltese Falcon is one of my favorite crime fiction novels ever. Part of the reason for that is the movie. I saw the movie before I read the book, but when you read the book it reads almost exactly like the movie sounds. The only thing that’s missing is The Flitcraft Parable, which I won’t tell you about. You’ll have to read the book to find that. But it’s one of the most intriguing little digressions from the story that you can imagine. And it’s in there for a reason. I think it has to do with Hammett’s existential outlook or something. Anyway, it’s a really interesting story within the story. And otherwise, for me, this stands as one of the most—one of the best books in crime fiction that I’ve ever read. Because as a reader, I loved it, and as a writer, I’m inspired by it. Writing novels like this shows you how you can essentially write novels in a way that are highly adaptable into movies. And this has actually been cited as a so-called quote-unquote movie book. So if you want to write stories or screenplays, I highly recommend—especially in this genre, crime fiction—I highly recommend Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. I’m re-reading it. You can see I haven’t gotten very far and not because it isn’t a great book, but because I have so many other books I’m reading that this one has taken a back seat. And, in any case, read the book and enjoy it. Thanks!