The Maltese Falcon cover art

The Maltese Falcon

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

The Maltese Falcon

By: Dashiell Hammett
Narrated by: Robertson Dean
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

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.

©2018 Dashiell Hammett (P)2018 Blackstone Publishing Crime Fiction Romance Romantic Comedy Suspense Thriller & Suspense Fiction Comedy Crime Mystery

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The Adventures of Sam Spade: Lawless cover art
Sergeant Cribb cover art
The Black Echo: Special Edition cover art
The Corpse Steps Out cover art
The Busy Body cover art
Shardlake: The Complete BBC Radio Collection cover art
Agatha Christie: Murder Is Easy (Dramatised) cover art
Someone's Been Sleeping in My Bed cover art
American Girl cover art
Storm Front cover art
The Unknown Beloved cover art
Open and Shut cover art
The Poet cover art
Beware the Past cover art
The Joe Dillard Series Box Set, Part 1: Books 1-4 cover art
The Alienist cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
Loved the original book & film.
The narrator made it sound just like Sam Spade, 'dead pan', just like Sam(character) and Humphrey Bogart(actor) in the film.
Loved every minute of it.
A classic from start to finish.

Classic book/film, great narrator

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Heard it recently described as a masterpiece, and it really is. VERY highly recommended. You probably already know the plot, but this was the story that kickstarted an entire genre.

The Original Hard Boiled

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
enjoyed listening to this classic detective story, so different from today's private eye tales so enjoy

classic

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I didn't know what it was all about through the entire plot of this book, but the conclusion made up for it 100%. Great katharsis you can expect from a good criminal novel. 5/5!

Hell of a book.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The narration is great. The story is okay. It jumps very much from one topic to the next without really stringing them together.

A true Noir drama, with all the good AND bad.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
narrator is as good as Jeff Harding who in my humble opinion is one of the best out there!

a classic. totally compulsive read

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
One of the true greats of hard boiled Detective fiction wonderfully brought to life. Almost 100 years old and still putting many of its contemporaries to shame.

Fantastic

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Hammett’s Sam Spade classic read vividly by Robertson Dean, who kept the pace going and the tension building as the plot raced to its gripping end. Well worth a listen…

Cracking Crime Caper

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Thoroughly recommended. 5 stars great story well read. And at least as good as the movie

Terrific

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
amazing work specifically coming in with the bias of having seen the movie adaptation and more so having read other source material for film adaptations this proved more valuable in that it gave insights onto to strengths and weakness of adaptation and the genre itself amongst other insight into genre tropes and other subtleties like insight into the writers subconscious intelligence and influences.

Don't delay

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews