Just answering this question makes me want to read it again. The impact of the final scene would have been severely lessened had we known what Spade was thinking. In searching for the Falcon, Spade is searching for the person who killed his partner.
SPOILER ALERT: The point of the POV is to have the reader, like the characters Spade is engaged with, overlook his true motive. The closest he comes is the frequent descriptions of characters’ eyes and gestures. The narrator presents that objective view without describing any thoughts.
The reader is an observer in a close third-person objective relationship. Sam Spade appears in every scene, but the POV isn’t first-person. The book is full of memorable scenes with sharp dialogue, tight descriptions, and the selection of a point of view that heightens the impact on the reader. Mark de Castrique (nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – Secret Lives): Other than the Sherlock Holmes canon, which has been just plain fun to re-read many times since I was in sixth grade, I have re-read Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon multiple times. This informed a key relationship (between Molly and Giselle) in my novel The Maid. At one point, I found myself rereading Shakespeare’s Othello and thinking deeply about Desdemona’s handmaid in that book and the beguiling and intimate relationship she had with her charge. With The Maid, I reread widely, wildly and voraciously. Nita Prose (nominated for Best Novel – The Maid): When I’m setting out on a new manuscript, I re-read anything and everything that might inform scenes, moments, characters or a certain tone I’m after in my book. I love the characters, the voices and the authenticity of the experiences within the stories.Įli Cranor (nominated for Best First Novel – Don’t Know Tough): I try to go back and read True Grit each year. I find myself returning to these books often because they embody the kind of work I aspire to produce myself. Jackson, Gorilla, My Love by Toni Cade Bambara and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans. Juliana Goodman (nominated for Best Young Adult – The Black Girls Left Standing): Monday’s Not Coming by Tiffany D.
Virginia Wolfe, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, and Kate Chopin are all authors that come to mind when I think about books I have kept over the years and still pick up when I’m looking for inspiration. Seraphina Nova Glass (nominated for Best Paperback Original – On a Quiet Street): It’s the books that I was forced to read in a college literature class that I would have never picked up on my own at that age that have become my favorites-books that speak to my soul and changed me in some way.
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