The Black Bird Is Back!

I had known for a long while that Iowa crime novelist Max Allan Collins wanted to pen a sequel to Dashiell Hammett’s genre-defining 1930 private-eye novel, The Maltese Falcon, so when the official announcement of his effort came last September, I was hardly surprised. However, the subsequent rush to print of Return of the Maltese Falcon, due out from Hard Case Crime in January 2026, seems remarkable.

As Collins writes today in his blog, “My editor at Hard Case Crime, Charles Ardai, is something of a wonder. Normally when you turn a manuscript in, it takes an editor months or at least weeks to get you the line-edited manuscript to go over. Charles gets back to you the next day, or if he takes two or three days, he apologizes for the delay. Then he has the book typeset in another day (he does this himself) and provides galley proofs, and to say this is unusual is an understatement.

“It’s very cool to have the process go this quickly. Writers like the feeling when a book has ‘gone to bed.’”

No less cool is the fact that we now have a front for Return!



Both this novel’s cover painting and design (including title type hearkening back to Falcon’s original edition) are credited to Irvin Rodriguez, “an artist working in painting, drawing, digital media and illustration based in Los Angeles.” You can see more of Rodriguez’s work on his Instagram page.

Meanwhile, Collins has posted his afterword to Return of the Maltese Falcon in CrimeReads, which tells how he was first introduced to Hammett’s best-known yarn and what he asked of himself in order to echo that long-dead author’s writing style. An introductory note to the excerpt cites some resources Collins used in order to re-create the Depression-era San Francisco of Sam Spade’s heyday. (Don Herron’s The Dashiell Hammett Tour receives due applause.) Why post this afterword rather than some portion of the actual story? “Where normally an advance look at the first chapter might have been used as a promotional teaser,” he explains in his blog, “something had to substitute, because the public-domain nature of the original novel won’t kick in until my sequel is published next year. So advance promo couldn’t use any of my novel itself—we’d be in violation of the original copyright.”

I’m normally skeptical of another writer being hired to augment a prominent but deceased author’s oeuvre; Collins himself acknowledges that “following in the footsteps of a genius writer as precise as Dashiell Hammett is a sort of suicide note.” However, the creator of series gumshoe Nathan Heller has already done a fine job over these last 16 years of doubling the number of novels starring Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (a run that ended recently with Baby, It’s Murder). I am confident Return of the Maltese Falcon will do Hammett proud, too.

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Max Collins’ CrimeReads post today reminds me that a “somewhat different version of [The Maltese Falcon]’s initial pulp serialization” was included in Otto Penzler’s The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (2010). I never did get around to reading that variant. Perhaps now is the time to take it down off the shelf.