Hank Risan, the protagonist of this noir thriller, is as unlikely as the tale he has to tell. And this version, which draws in characters as diverse as Leonardo DiCaprio and the woman butchered in one of Hollywood’s greatest unsolved murders, constitutes a real-life mystery every bit as bizarre as the one Sam Spade confronted on film. It turns out there is another, far stranger version, and another Falcon, several more in fact.

But it is just one chapter in a complex tale. That is the official version of what happened to the Maltese Falcon. Spectators gasped as a bidder in the audience dueled with one on the telephone, driving the price higher and higher.

But at the auction in Bonhams’s Madison Avenue showroom on November 25, 2013, the bidding quickly passed $1 million, then $2 million, then $3 million. There was talk it might go for $1 million or more. In 2013 it was offered for sale by Bonhams auction house. retrospective, with stops at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, and elsewhere. Lost to history for decades, it resurfaced in the 1980s in the hands of a Beverly Hills oral surgeon, and beginning in 1991 traveled the world as part of a Warner Bros.

A cop asking Sam Spade about the Maltese Falcon in the final scene ofĪ long with the ruby slippers Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz and Orson Welles’s “Rosebud” sled, which burns in the final frames of Citizen Kane, there is probably no more iconic item of Hollywood memorabilia than the Maltese Falcon, the black statuette that Humphrey Bogart, as detective Sam Spade, tracked down in John Huston’s classic film of the same name.

Maltese falcon yacht submarine