Spade & Archer
By Joe Gores
Orion £12.99, 337 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.39

To imitate Dashiell Hammett, as Joe Gores has done in this prequel to The Maltese Falcon, seems like an impossible act of literary ventriloquism.

The pace must run quickly, the sentences must be whistle-clean, the characters compellingly untrustworthy.

Gores, himself a former San Francisco private eye, mostly gets the voice right, even if Hammett proves to be a writer whose talent can’t hope to be caught.

The plot imagines private investigator Sam Spade’s bumpy career before it reached the case featured in The Maltese Falcon. He becomes his own boss, hires a secretary, falls in with his office neighbour Miles Archer, and heads straight into bars and backstreets to nail the case of a gold heist in the San Francisco docks.

As with Hammett’s crimes, this one points to corruption all over the city, enjoyably navigated by Gores, a master flatterer, if not imitator.