Spade and Archer

Notes

Spade and Archer was Joe Gores‘s last novel, a prequel to The Maltese Falcon, written by his literary hero, Dashiell Hammett. Gores sets about telling Sam Spade’s back story.

The critics rated Gores’s storytelling higher than Hammett’s original.

Publisher’s Synopsis

When Sam Spade gets drawn into the Maltese Falcon case, we know what to expect: straight talk, hard questions, no favours, and no way for anyone to get underneath the protective shell he wears like a second skin. We know that his late partner, Miles Archer, was a son of a bitch; that Spade is sleeping with Archer’s wife. What we don’t know is how Spade became who he is. Now SPADE & ARCHER completes the picture.

It’s 1921—seven years before Sam Spade will solve the famous case of the Maltese Falcon. He’s just set up his own agency in San Francisco and he gets off to a quick start, working cases (he doesn’t do domestic) and hiring a bright young secretary named Effie Perrine.

When he’s hired by a prominent San Francisco banker to find his missing son, Spade gets the break he’s been looking for. He spends the next few years dealing with booze runners, waterfront thugs, banking swindlers, gold smugglers, and bumbling cops. He brings in Miles Archer as a partner to help bolster the agency, though it was Archer who stole his girl while he was fighting in World War I. All along, Spade will tangle with an enigmatic villain who holds a long-standing grudge against Spade.

And, of course, he’ll fall in love—though it won’t turn out for the best. It never does with dames.

Read a full review of Spade and Archer by Joe Gores at Kirkus Reviews.