In his introduction to The Maltese Falcon, the author Dashiell Hammett outlined how Sam Spade differed from his illustrious predecessors:
“Spade has no original …For your private detective does not want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with.”
Emerging from a rough, early 20th century sensibility, which included Army service and tuberculosis, Dashiell Hammett, once a Pinkerton detective operative himself, needed to make a few bucks and thus turned to the pulp fiction magazines popular from 1900 in America. In keeping with the tradition of anonymity the Pinkerton detectives required, in his early works, Hammett never named his protagonist, referring to them simply as The Continental Op, that is, operative.
Hammett’s skill was to create a hardened detective for his times. Sam Spade was cynical enough to get the truth from suspects and clients, believing that everyone is greedy, everyone lies.
“We didn’t exactly believe your story.”
“Then –?”
“We believed your two hundred dollars.”
“You mean –” She seemed not to know what he meant.
“I mean that you paid us more than if you’d been telling the truth,” he explained blandly, “and enough more to make it all right.”
― Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon
First published in serialized version in Black Mask, and as a novel in January 1930, The Maltese Falcon was an instant hit. Sam Spade was built for trouble. Lean, sharp-eyed, and already two moves ahead. In a city that chewed the soft and conned the innocent, he walked like he owned the sidewalk and knew where the bodies were buried—because he’d put a few there himself. Such was this character’s popularity that Hammett wrote several more short stories featuring Sam Spade through the 1940’s.
Hammett wrote five novels, among them the Glass Key, The Dain Curse and Red Harvest…
“Who shot him?” I asked.
The grey man scratched the back of his neck and said:
“Somebody with a gun.”
― Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest