Actually they do have a review...
Spade & Archer:
The Prequel to Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon
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By Joe Gores
(Alfred A. Knopf; 337 pages; $28)
Imagine coffee costing a dime, women wearing hats and kidskin gloves,
cable cars criss-crossing the city, and stevedores working the docks
surrounding the Ferry Building.
In "Spade & Archer," Joe Gores' prequel to Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese
Falcon," we return to that time in long-gone San Francisco. It's 1921, Sam
Spade's back from World War I, working as a private detective for
Continental Ops. Spade, disillusioned after solving a missing-persons case
in Spokane, Wash., and finding his girl married to former colleague Miles
Archer, returns home to San Francisco. He puts out his shingle, in this
case, letters painted on his glass office door - "Samuel Spade Esquire" -
until Effie, his Greek secretary factotum, persuades him otherwise.
"Samuel Spade" sounds better.
That's not all Effie does - she culls information from The Chronicle's
shipping news notices, which leads Spade to the waterfront, the hunt for a
society millionaire's runaway son and smack into the theft of gold
bullion.
Gores offers a complex narrative thread, fragmented ...
rest at
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/02/06/RVO415I1FO.DTL&hw=gores&sn=002&sc=743
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