January 7, 2011
This one hurts because of all the wasted potential.
Sam Spade is probably best known as the hard boiled detective played by Humphry Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. Created by Dashiell Hammett in 1930, the character has since taken on a life of his own. He is the epitome of the tough-talking detective.
Here’s how Dashiell Hammett described Spade:
Spade has no original. He is a dream man in 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. For your private detective does not — or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague — 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, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client.
Wouldn’t he have made an amazing comic book character? Sadly, all we have are these ads, which really only show that Sam Spade knows more about hair care than you might expect.
Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride 
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