Spade & Archer by Joe Gores

Spade & Archer by Joe Gores

A wonderfully dark, pitch-perfect noir prequel to The Maltese Falcon, featuring Dashiell Hammett's beloved detective, Sam Spade.

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.

Joe Gores (1931-2011) won Edgar Awards in three separate categories: Best First Novel, Best Short Story, and Best TV Series Segment. His many day jobs included truck driver, bodybuilding instructor, carny, and English teacher at a boys' school in Kenya as well as a dozen years as a private investigator in the San Francisco area. His work repossessing cars provided grist for the mill of his DKA series, making them -- in the words of Ellery Queen -- [as] authentic as a fist in your face. Critics have compared Gores to Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Erle Stanley Gardner -- and to Dashiell Hammett.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780307277060
ISBN 10	0307277062
Title	Spade & Archer
Author	Joe Gores
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Penguin Random House LLC
Year published	2010-03-09
Number of pages	352
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.