- Title
- Sam Spade: anatomy of a private investigator
- Creator
- Gulddal, Jesper
- Relation
- Private Investigator p. 34-44
- Relation
- Crime Uncovered
- Relation
- http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/books/view-Book,id=5180/
- Publisher
- Intellect
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2016
- Description
- The literary life of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade was as brief as his posthumous career has been enduring. Appearing only in The Maltese Falcon (first serialized in Black Mask in 1929) as well as in three later, less influential short stories, he has become an icon of popular culture and is widely recognized as the archetypal private investigator of interwar hardboiled detective fiction. Raymond Chandler had Spade in mind when stating that Hammett had taken 'murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley' (1995 (1944]: 988), and numerous later Pis both in literature and on film, including Chandler's own Philip Marlowe, trace their pedigree directly to the antihero of Hammett's most successful novel. This lasting appeal must be ascribed to the careful positioning of Spade within a network of cultural and historical reference points that determine him. Spade draws on entrenched American mythologies of individualism and self-reliance, yet also responds to the modern phenomenon of urban crime and, more generally, to the social and political turmoil that marred the United States at this time. Walking the 'mean streets' of San Francisco with confidence and savvy, always the master of the situation however puzzling or dangerous, Spade has the qualities needed to come out on top in this brutal world of everyone-for-himself: unsentimental, jaded and opportunistic both financially and sexually, he is also committed to a personal code of conduct that tells him apart from the criminals he hunts.
- Subject
- Sam Spade; Dashiell Hammett; detective fiction
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1327140
- Identifier
- uon:25586
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781783205233
- Language
- eng
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