Sam Spade Sam Spade Sam Spade is a fictional private detective and the protagonist of Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel, "The Maltese Falcon". Spade also appeared in four lesser-known short stories by Hammett. "The Maltese Falcon", first published as a serial in the pulp magazine "Black Mask", is the only full-length novel in which Spade appears. The character, however, is widely cited as a crystallizing figure in the development of hard-boiled private detective fiction—Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, for instance, was strongly influenced by Spade. Spade was a departure from Hammett's nameless and less-than-glamorous detective, The Continental Op. Spade combined several features of previous
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