RETURN OF THE MALTESE FALCON

Did you ever imagine that The Maltese Falcon could spawn a sequel? Well, Collins has, and although it’s no match for Dashiell Hammett, it’s surprisingly successful on its own terms.

After all, Hammett’s novel ends a bit up in the air, with (spoiler alert) Brigid O’Shaughnessy on her way to jail for killing Sam Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, but scheming, bloated Casper Gutman’s gunsel Wilmer Cook escaping after the precious falcon behind all the novel’s intrigue is revealed to be a phony. So why shouldn’t Gutman’s daughter, Rhea, call on Spade just a week later, as Christmas 1928 approaches, to hire him to track down the bird that the untrustworthy supplier, Russian general Kemidov, replaced with a fake? Spade agrees, and soon he has a stable of four clients—Rhea, Chicago gambler Dixie Monahan, British Museum curator Steward Blackwood, and Corrine Wonderly, Brigid’s kid sister—each of whom, unknown to the others, has paid him a retainer to locate a treasure none of them intends to share with anyone else. There’ll be more fatalities, of course, including two members of the original cast, before Spade gathers his clients together for a Christmas party at which he stages exactly the sort of denouement Hammett consistently took pains to avoid in all his fiction. Collins’ dialogue sounds pleasingly like Hammett’s; his plotting is even twistier; and if his descriptions mix Hammett’s terse, affectless minimalism with Raymond Chandler’s fondness for florid similes, that’s clearly, as he notes in an engaging coda, his intention.

Fans convinced that nobody could possibly continue a tale that ends so definitely owe it to themselves to give Collins a try.