sam spade

Sam Spade, is as gray as the economic skies over America and moves through the story as cool and slick as a Teflon cat. -Stephen Sullivan, 2011

Sam Spade is the protagonist in Dashiell Hammett's novel The Maltese Falcon (1930) and the various films and adaptations based on it, as well as in A Man Called Spade and Other Stories by Hammett.

Hammett says about him:
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. …more