The Maltese Falcon By Dashiell Hammett - Dashiell Hammett’s novel, The Maltese Falcon, is a hard-boiled detective novel; a subset of the mystery genre. Before the appearance of this sub-genre, mystery novels were mainly dominated by unrealistic cases and detectives like Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.
Sam Spade: Sam Spade is the hero of the novel. He is a detective, who worked for a large agency before branching out on his own in San Francisco. He has a very defiant attitude towards law, which he portrays to the maximum to clients, able to maintain his defiance in a way that doesn’t compromise his practice.
In The Maltese Falcon (1941), Humphrey Bogart plays Sam Spade, a private eye detective who is lured into the chase for a bird statue by a mysterious and deceitful woman named Ruth. His objectives are to find the Maltese Falcon, and discover the murderer of two crimes: the death of his former partner, Miles Archer, and another man named Thursby.
The Maltese Falcon movie (1941) was considered the first noir film and encapsulates conventions of Crime Fiction and it's sub genres: Film Noir and Hard Boiled detective fiction. Generically, value lies in its plot, its choice and the nature of the characters, and the visual conventions amongst others.