Thanks for stopping by! I'm Cori and I'm happy you've found your way here. If you're wondering why my blog is called "Let's Eat Grandpa," it's an old grammar joke: Let's eat, grandpa! Let's eat grandpa! (Punctuation saves lives.) 
Read because: I love mysteries and for some reason this one had escaped my grasp so far.
Purchased from: The Avid Reader
Rating: 8 out of 10
Synopsis (from Amazon): In The Maltese Falcon, the best known of Hammett’s Sam Spade novels (including The Dain Curse and The Glass Key), Spade is tough enough to bluff the toughest thugs and hold off the police, risking his reputation when a beautiful woman begs for his help, while knowing that betrayal may deal him a new hand in the next moment. Spade’s partner is murdered on a stakeout; the cops blame him for the killing; a beautiful redhead with a heartbreaking story appears and disappears; grotesque villains demand a payoff he can’t provide; and everyone wants a fabulously valuable gold statuette of a falcon, created as tribute for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. Who has it? And what will it take to get it back? Spade’s solution is as complicated as the motives of the seekers assembled in his hotel room, but the truth can be a cold comfort indeed.
My Review: Right away you know that Hammet is an excellent writer. The first paragraph is perfectly penned:
Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down — from high flat temples — in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.
That’s a great start. I thought the entire book was expertly written, but overall I’m not sure if I fell in love with the story itself. I fell for the cold, hard Sam Spade. I relished in the character of Brigid and her many masks. I thought that Cairo and Gutman were excellent. And the writing was stellar. All of the descriptions and the dialog were so deliciously noir. I watched the movie tonight and although Bogey looks nothing like a blond satan, he played the character to a T. And the movie was really faithful to the book, which I thoroughly appreciated. But overall, I feel like I missed some sort of payoff at the end of both, and the plot felt a little choppy in places. I loved the scene between Spade and Brigid at the end — “I won’t play the sap for you” — but something felt like it was missing. Had I gotten whatever payoff my brain thinks I should have gotten, I would have given this at least a nine rating. I’ll definitely be reading the other two Spade novels, and the Thin Man is already on my shelf. (Finished 5/20/09)
