I picked this up because Sam Spade in the Maltese Falcon is one of my favorite books and movies and wanted more Spade. The three Spade stories the only other stories that Spade appears in are good, but my favorite story in the collection, "The Assistant Murderer" introduces a completely different kind of PI. Alex Rush the ugliest detective in anything I've read, ugly ugly ugly appears on almost every page, he was a shady cop and he gets sucked into this case. Rush is smart not like the thuggish brute he looks like.
If you liked Maltese Falcon this would be an interesting read, but make sure you read the Alex Rush story as well for the terrific plot. ( )

This volume is out of print, but what it is is the 1945 collection of Hammett's three Sam Spade novelettes along with several other noirish short stories. The Spade stories read like good fanfic, which sounds odd to say since it's his own character. I *don't* know what order Hammett wrote them in relation to The Maltese Falcon, but from reading the short stories, it seems to me that they're not so much short fiction working up to writing a novel as attempts to play with the character and see if another full-length novel is waiting to be told.

Anyway, Hammett has moments of awesome, and he's very good at writing action from the point of view of the character immediately involved in it, but the short story format doesn't work near as well for him. There just isn't enough *there* there for me to be completely satisfied.

Still, Sam Spade is an alluring character. And the part of me that adores historical detail is head over heels for the semi-grungy, anti-elite, regular-joe settings. :D ( )