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
The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein public, and for unknown reasons decided to attribute authorship to Mary Shelley, thus helping to begin a "hoax" that has persisted up to the present. Lauritsen maintains that revisions to "Frankenstein" made in 1823 and 1831 weakened the work, and that while it was ostensibly Mary Shelley who revised "Frankenstein" into its 1831 form, it may primarily have been revised by the political philosopher William Godwin. Lauritsen argues that handwriting alone cannot be used to determine the actual author of "Frankenstein". The drafts and manuscripts are incomplete and in the final stages. Moreover, portions of the novel were dictated by