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Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) http://tinyurl.com/Hammett

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Sam Spade

From The Maltese Falcon, 1930.

Reader: Jessica Teeter

A staple of California fiction, hard-boiled detective novels feature dark city scapes set within a morally adrift cosmos. It takes a strong man to go to his own way in such a place—where the real challenge is living up to your own code.

In his 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett created his most famous character, Sam Spade, who followed his own set of rules—just like a fallen archangel.

Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.

Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled style influenced other detective writers, including Raymond Chandler, who credited Hammett with giving "murder back to the kind of people who commit it."