The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett

"The stuff that dreams are made of."

Sam Spade is a hard-drinking, hard-hitting private eye whose partner is murdered while on a case. He finds himself caught between the police and a gallery of colorful criminals—the fat man Kasper Gutman, the effeminate Joel Cairo, and the dangerous Brigid O'Shaughnessy—all hunting for a priceless jeweled statuette of a falcon.

Dashiell Hammett's novel is the archetype of the noir thriller. It stripped the detective story of its gentlemanly puzzle-solving roots and replaced them with greed, betrayal, and a morally ambiguous hero who survives by being tougher and smarter than the crooks.