M is for The MALTESE FALCON

         PULP FICTION 

                     late 1800’s – mid 1950’s

The Maltese Falcon is a 1929 hardboiled detective novel by Dashiell Hammett. originally serialized in the magazine, Black Mask beginning with the September 1929 issue.

Samuel Dashiell Hammett (1894 – 1961) was an American author of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories, screenwriter, and political activist. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, and the Continental Op. 

Wikipedia

   
                    
 The main character of The Maltese Falcon is Sam        
 Spade who appears in this novel and in three lesser  
 known short stories, yet is widely cited as the   
 crystallizing figure in the development of the 
 hardboiled private detective genre.
                                  

Hardboiled fiction is a literary genre that shares some of its characters and settings with crime fiction, especially detective stories.

The genre's typical protagonist is a detective, who witnesses daily the violence of organized crime that flourished during Prohibition, while dealing with a legal system that had become as corrupt as the organized crime itself.  Rendered cynical by this cycle of violence, the detectives of hardboiled fiction are classic antiheros. Notable hardboiled detectives include Philip Marlowe, Mike Hammer, Sam Spade, Lew Archer, and The Continental Op.

                                        

  The Maltese Falcon has been adapted several  
  times for the cinema, the most famous one 
  starred Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter 
  Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet in,1941. It is  

  considered to be a film noir.

   

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Schmaltzy rhymes with Maltese which means I can use it on this post and this is one schmaltzy Pulp Cover. 

Always, Em-Musing