Maltese Falcon Society Don Herron and private investigator Jayson Wechter. The society's first meeting was held at John's Grill, a restaurant where Dashiell Hammett ate and which he featured in "The Maltese Falcon". The speakers at that first meeting were David Fechheimer, a Hammett researcher and private investigator, and E. Hoffmann Price, a pulp fiction author. The society opened chapters in New York and Japan. By 1982, the society had 110 members in San Francisco, 55 in Japan, and 50 in New York. As its official toast, the society adopted the one used by Sam Spade in Chapter 2 of "The Maltese Falcon":
Death of the novel the "death of the novel" were José Ortega y Gasset, who wrote his "Decline of the Novel" in 1925 and Walter Benjamin in his 1930 review "Krisis des Romans" (Crisis of the Novel). In the 1950s and 1960s, contributors to the discussion included Gore Vidal, Roland Barthes, and John Barth. Ronald Sukenick wrote the story "The Death of the Novel" in 1969. In 1954, Wolfgang Kayser argued that the death of the narrator would lead to the death of the novel - a view that has since been contested by many people. Meanwhile, Alain Robbe-Grillet argued that the novel would