Maltese Falcon

Listening to Maltese Falcon on the subway this morning, I was suddenly swept up in a current of curiosity -- What exactly was the world like? In some sense the 1920s was perhaps the best time in American history. The rest is crap in various ways. An impulse to read up every fiction and nonfiction that describe life in this era, and the movies too, surged inside. Ah, I wish I was a student at Oxford's history department in Connie Willis' time traveling universe, and my thesis would surely be New York or Chicago (or Hollywood?) in the 1920s.

(MF was published in 1930.)