![]() ![]() ![]() The Maltese Falcon had already gone through two successful versions before John Huston’s 1941 film, the one we remember today it was Huston’s first directorial effort and one that he later admitted he translated for the screen by simply ripping out pages from the book and circling lines of dialogue. Incredible as it seems, Hollywood never asked Hammett to adapt one of his own books for the screen, but he had sensational luck with other screenwriters. Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy, the Mexican novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, and even the cyberpunk science fiction writer William Gibson all owe debts of varying degree to Hammett. Hammett’s influence not only pervades the genre of crime fiction -as Raymond Chandler shrewdly observed, he “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse”-but extends beyond it. Vintage Books celebrated with new editions of all of Hammett’s titles, including a previously unpublished novella and a collection of his early pulp stories. ![]() Last year saw the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of his first novel, Red Harvest, and this year is the seventy-fifth anniversary of his most famous and best-selling book, The Maltese Falcon. ![]() So far it’s been a good century for Dashiell Hammett. ![]()
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