When I was a kid, I watched the usual fare of The Little Mermaid, The Last Unicorn, and other The Adjective Noun cartoons. But perhaps less usual, I absolutely loved old detective movies. I just gobbled them up! The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and The Thin Man were three of my absolute favourites (and, to date, I think I've seen The Thin Man at least 50 times). So when I found a copy of Hammett's The Maltese Falcon at a garage sale, I knew I had to read it. 
 And it's pretty close to the movie. Really close to the movie. 
 Hammett's dialogue is fantastic and full of character, so it's very easy to tell who is speaking even without added signifiers. Gutman, in particular, was fantastic. It made me appreciate how good the casting was in the movie version. 
 Some aspects are dated (or ought to be, but that's a rant for another day). The frequent references to Gutman's fat, for example, or Cairo's homosexuality (something that I hadn't picked up on in the movie version for some strange reason, though in retrospect it's quite clearly there, too). 
 The romance is just as gag-worthy. Man meets woman, man knows woman for a handful of days during which she doesn't do much except lie to him and rather obviously try to manipulate him, man falls so deeply in love with woman that he vows to wait for her while she serves her 20 year jail sentence. I mean, really? Couldn't the love angle just be dropped? Or is it just meant to highlight what a tough cookie Spade is that he can be head-over-heels in love and still turn her in? Either way, it was the only aspect of the story that I felt was bungled.