Black Mask Magazine, featuring the first installment of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. September, 1929.
Black Mask Magazine, featuring the first installment of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. September, 1929.
For me Dashiell Hammett give a better look at the 1920s than F. Scott Fitgerald.
Nothing with you in it stinks for me, Miss Gonzales.“
She stood away from the door and waved me in. "We will have a drink,” she said. “The God-damnest drink we will have. I adore flattery, however dishonest.”
I went in. A gun in the kidney wouldn’t have surprised me a bit. She stood so that I had to practically push her mammaries out of the way to get through the door. She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.
We said goodbye. I watched the cab out of sight. I went back up the steps and into the bedroom and pulled the bed to pieces and remade it. There was a long dark hair on one of the pillows. There was a huge lump of lead at the pit of my stomach.
The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right.
To say goodbye is to die a little.
Brigid O’Shaughnessy: “I haven’t lived a good life. I’ve been bad, worse than you could know.”
Sam Spade “You know, that’s good, because if you actually were as innocent as you pretend to be, we’d never get anywhere"
I don’t see what there is to be so cagey about,“ she snapped. "And I don’t like your manners.”
“I’m not crazy about yours,” I said. “I didn’t ask to see you. You sent for me. I don’t mind your ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don’t mind your showing me your legs. They’re very swell legs and it’s a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don’t waste your time trying to cross-examine me.