Dashiell Hammett's novel, The Maltese Falcon, is a hard-boiled detective novel; a subset of the mystery genre. Before the appearance of this subgenre, crime novels were mainly dominated by unrealistic cases and detective stories such as Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. As Malmgren states, "The murders in these stories are implausibly motivated, the plots completely artificial and the characters pathetically two-dimensional, cardboard puppets and lovers, papier-mâché villains and detectives of exquisite and impossible kindness." (Malmgren, 371) On the other hand, Hammett tried to write a realistic crime novel – the “hard-boiled” genre. In Maltese Falcon, Hammett uses language, symbolism, and characterization to bring the story closer to reality. The Maltese Falcon is written in a casual tone full of colloquial expressions in a laconic and sharp style from an objective point of view. In the novel, Hammett used a lot of slang specific to a social group: the criminals of the underworld, the police and the detectives who dealt with them. For example, when Spade was charged by the police for killing his partner, Miles Archer, he said: You shouldn't try to charge me with more than one murder at a time. Your first idea that I knocked out Thursby [a character who is murdered early in the novel] because he killed Miles falls apart if you blame me for killing Miles too […] But suppose he did, you would have could have blitz' both. (Hammett, 451) Words like pin (accused), knock off (kill), and blip (kill) are widely known slang terms at the time, so incorporating them into speech makes the characters more rough and realistic. Hammett uses a concise and laconic style that accelerates action, controls emotions and limits clear access... to the center of the paper... in one of the largest professional detective agencies in the United States, he is able to bring a an aura of realism with a bit of pessimism in his stories. For The Maltese Falcon, such realism is achieved by using the language of that social group in a style that conveys to the reader a feeling of almost real action; symbolism of the characters compared to real events; and characterize characters with real-life human qualities. As a result, some say, “Dashiell Hammett is the person who saved the [mystery] genre by bringing it back to the real world” (Malmgren, 371) Works Cited: Abrahams, Pual P. “On Rereading the Maltese Falcon” Journal of American Culture ( Bowling Green) 18.1 (1995): 97Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. New York: Vintage Books, 1930 Malmgren, Carl D. “The Crime of the Sign: The Detective Novel of Dashiell Hammett” Twentieth Century Literature 45.3 (1990): 371