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I am still rather fixated on the idea that Brigid might be considered too young to have been as she was portrayed: an accomplished confidence trickster.
She said 22 early on, but it seems everyone knew she was a liar (even the reader is told this in fairly short order). So her age could quite believably be anything from say 17 to 26 or so. (We let Jennifer Ehle get away with playing Elizabeth Bennet - who was "not yet one-and-twenty" - when Ehle was 25. I can't say I was convinced Jennifer looked 21, but then in The Maltese Falcon we are not supposed to be convinced Brigid was 22 either.)
So Brigid might be, say, 26. And what do we know of her youth? (And what would we believe even if she told us?) She might have been a military or diplomatic brat that spent her formative years in foreign lands, gaining confidence in the presence of strangers (etc. etc. etc.); for all we know she might be an accomplished linguist with contacts throughout Europe - none of which would help much when dealing with a hick-detective in San Francisco, so it never comes into the story.
A stretch, maybe, but then this is a 1930s detective novel.
It's not that important, it just seemed an odd fault to pick up on, in a book with so many (to me) more prominent woes.
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