Collins Brings Back Sam Spade

Iowa crime-fictionist Max Allan Collins has so many irons in the fire right now, it’s hard keeping track of everything. He has a Kickstarter campaign in progress to raise $30,000 toward production of a 10-part audio version of his earliest Nathan Heller detective novel, 1983’s True Detective. (With just three more days to go, the effort has already brought in $25,558!) Beyond that, he and his wife, Barbara Collins, are completing work on Death by Fruitcake, an indie film based on one of the stories in their cozyish “Trash ’n’ Treasures” mystery series (published under their joint pseudonym, “Barbara Allan”). And shooting has wrapped on Mickey Spillane’s Saturday Night in Cap City, a movie Collins co-adapted from “A Bullet for Satisfaction,” one of two non-Mike Hammer novellas he combined in the 2018 Hard Case Crime release The Last Stand.

(Left) The Maltese Falcon (1961), with cover art by Harry Bennett.

Now comes word that Collins will pen a sequel to Dashiell Hammett’s only Sam Spade private-eye novel:

The publisher Hard Case Crime announced Thursday that Collins’ “The Return of the Maltese Falcon” will be released in January 2026, when the Hammett classic featuring Spade, “The Maltese Falcon,” enters the public domain. “The Maltese Falcon,” published in 1930 and known to movie fans for the 1941 adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart, is widely regarded as a model for the hard-boiled detective novel.

“It has been an inspiration to authors and filmmakers, actors and illustrators and musicians—and to me, for the entire 50-plus years I’ve been a novelist,” Collins said in a statement. “Not that writing about the world Hammett created, and those immortal, sometimes immoral characters isn’t challenging—Hammett’s best mystery also happens to be one of the greatest American novels, period.”

When copyright protection ends for a book, anyone is free to use the characters and story line. After F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” entered the public domain, in 2021, new creations included a Tony-winning musical of the same name and a prequel novel, “Nick,” by Michael Farris Smith.

According to Hard Case Crime, Collins’ new book will bring back Spade and Joel Cairo among other Hammett characters, and “a mysterious new femme fatale.” Collins, whose “Road to Perdition” was adapted into a film starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman, has a long history of working with famous literary detectives. He took over the Dick Tracy comic strip in the late 1970s after creator Chester Gould retired, and he was later authorized to continue Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer series.

“I’m something of an old hand at walking in the shoes of the giants who came before, though I never claim to filling them,” Collins told The Associated Press.

Various authorized Spade projects have been released, including a 2009 prequel, Joe Gores’ “Spade & Archer,” a novel about Spade and his professional partner, Miles Archer. Spade was featured this year in an AMC miniseries, “Monsieur Spade,” starring Clive Owen in a sequel that finds the detective retired and living in the South of France.

Collins has always been quick to list The Maltese Falcon as one of his favorite private investigator novels (as he did for The Rap Sheet years ago), and adds in his blog this week that he has long wished to compose a sequel to that yarn. After four decades spent concocting historical P.I. stories around Nate Heller, who is very much a Spade-like protagonist, Collins seems like an ideal candidate to breathe new vitality into Hammett’s “hard and shifty fellow.”

If I’m still around in early 2026, you can expect to find a copy of The Return of the Maltese Falcon clutched firmly in my hands.

FOLLOW-UP: Collins reports that “Our Kickstarter recently reached its goal of $30,000 and then some—as I write this it’s at $51,071! This is largely due to [director] Rob Burnett’s efforts on YouTube, which include a last-minute Jerry Lewis-style pseudo-telethon that put us over the hump.” Excellent news!