Spade Is Finished!

It was only this past September that we learned Iowa author Max Allan Collins was writing a sequel to Dashiell Hammett’s only Sam Spade private-eye novel, 1929’s The Maltese Falcon. But already, he says he’s done with that project. Collins explains in a new blog post:

I have delivered Return of the Maltese Falcon to Hard Case Crime and sister company Titan Books.

Publisher/editor Charles Ardai got back to me lightning fast, as is his habit, so the book has largely been put to bed—though not due out till January 2026. My Mike Hammer editor Andrew Sumner, at Titan, will be giving it an editorial pass soon, which will really finalize matters.

That gives me a year to be ready for what I think will be a lot of praise but possibly as many attacks. For readers of hard-boiled/noir fiction—or just great American fiction—my providing a sequel to a work of this stature—takes a good deal of nerve … and maybe reckless abandon.

But I’m something of an old hand at taking over for my heroes—scripting Dick Tracy for fifteen years, completing Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer over a period of seventeen years. It’s done out of love and respect, I assure you. And I consider it an incredible privilege to walk in such shoes, despite the unlikelihood of ever really filling them.

Obviously, Falcon did not require a sequel (or a prequel, which Joe Gores gave it in Spade & Archer); Hammett’s work stands on its own as one of the great American crime novels. But count me among those who are more than a bit curious to see what more Collins—best recognized for concocting stories about another durable 20th-century gumshoe, Nathan Heller—can do with Spade, his Depression-era San Francisco, and the various scoundrels and malefactors Hammett brought into the world through his yarn.