The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
Chandler's Philip Marlowe carries the same wry, weary voice and tangled case as Sam Spade, with a Los Angeles setting full of blackmail, corrupt money and sharp dialogue.
12 books to read next
Books Like The Maltese Falcon
If you loved The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon is a lean, dialogue-driven hard-boiled mystery. Readers love its clipped, wisecracking prose, its morally grey characters, and the way a simple missing-person job slowly reveals a web of greed and deception. The pace is brisk, the violence sudden, and the detective himself is cool, watchful and never quite trustworthy. It rewards close attention to who is lying to whom.
More hard-boiled private eyes
The Glass Key
Dashiell Hammett
Hammett's own political crime novel follows a loyal gambler caught in a city's power struggles, with the same spare style and loyalty tested by people who lie constantly.
The Long Goodbye
Raymond Chandler
A slower, more melancholy Marlowe novel that suits readers who enjoyed Spade's cynical code and the sense that every client is hiding something.
Same mind-bending twists
The Dain curse
Dashiell Hammett
Hammett's earlier serial novel uses the same detective-style investigation into a family's secrets, with a plot that keeps reversing as the truth comes out in fragments.
Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn
Readers who enjoyed the shifting alliances and unreliable motives of Maltese Falcon will find a modern thriller where every character's account is deliberately suspect.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Agatha Christie
A classic puzzle that rewards readers who like to track clues and lies, as Spade does, though with a gentler and more genteel tone.
Tough talk and flawed heroes
The Thin Man
Dashiell Hammett
Hammett's witty, fast-moving detective novel pairs a sardonic sleuth with sharp banter and a Manhattan crime plot, capturing the same cool, drink-fuelled style.
Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett
A violent, corrupt mining town gives the Continental Op a chance to play factions against each other, offering the gritty hard-boiled tone at its most uncompromising.
The Killer Inside Me
Jim Thompson
Thompson's dark, first-person noir shares the hard-boiled bleakness of Spade's world, though its narrator is far more unsettling and his morals far less certain.
Go deeper into noir
Farewell, My Lovely
Raymond Chandler
A tense, atmospheric Marlowe mystery built around a dangerous woman and a case that keeps widening, appealing to readers who loved the femme fatale in Maltese Falcon.
The postman always rings twice
James M. Cain, Andrew Braunsberg
A lean, fast noir about desire and murder told in plain, direct prose, delivering the same cynical tone and characters who make bad choices for money and passion.
The Big Clock
Kenneth Fearing
A tightly plotted 1940s thriller in which an ordinary man is drawn into a sinister investigation, sharing the paranoid pressure and urban menace of Hammett's story.
We earn a commission if you buy through these links. Learn more