Detective Novel

The Maltese Falcon is a detective novel wrote back in the 1930 by Dashiell Hammett. It is a detective novel, and it is clear of what it is from the beginning of the novel. We had two investigators, and they have a mystery to solve (but one die before he can do anything)...classic detective story which includes detectives in the story. Most of the detective novel at the time used elements like the dark side of the city, a foxy woman, murder, blood, strange European guy, crazy Asian scientist to catch the reader’s eyes. They all including some sort of mystery solving and saving some beautiful lady.


Almost all the detective stories I read had the following elements in them:
           

1.    The reader is giving a mystery to solve in the beginning of the story, and this mystery is seemingly a perfect crime or a twist of story line in the end.

2.     There are always some evidences that point to the wrong suspect, and most of the time is either the main character (detective) or some beautiful woman.

3.    The police, or the “official government” crime saver is always either stupid, don’t care about the crime, didn’t get there in time or something that’s preventing them from solving the crime (so our hero can solve it)

4.    Most of the time the official government is useless

5.    The hero character is always the smartest character, but sometime the female character may out smart him.

6.    Most of these novels give clues to the reader alone the way, so the reader can have the joy to try to find out the true first. (Which is good for radio too) But in the end most of them have a twist that totally change the perspective of the story and all the clues we got are now useless…

7.    The hero (detective) must work hard in order to find the evidences for the mystery.

8.    Including some fighting, gun fight or something that involving the hero doing some action

9.    The detective always have some relationship with one of the victim, either they are related, friends or love interest. (this means the hero didn’t solve the crime just for the money)

10. Most of the time the hero smoke. (this is great for film, the smoke create some cool contrast on the character)