Dashiell Hammett

Sam Spade is a partner in a private-eye firm who finds himself hounded by police when his partner is killed while tailing a man. The woman who asked his partner to follow the man turns out to be someone who is not what she says she is, and is really involved in something to do with the 'Maltese Falcon', a gold-encrusted life-sized statue of a falcon, the only one of its kind.