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 Maltese Falcon (1941 film) the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been, and, in their cockier moments, thought they approached. Other characters in "The Maltese Falcon", however, were based on people he met or worked with during that time. The novel itself was serialized in five parts in "Black Mask" during 1929 and 1930 before being published in book form in 1930 by Alfred A. Knopf. It was first filmed the next year and for a second time as "Satan Met a Lady" in 1936, but rewritten as a light comedy with many