As spring training turns serious and the Mets and the Yankees limber their hamstrings in the Land of the Pregnant Chad, the sportscaster Keith Olbermann will now clear up a couple of baseball related items: 1. She’s fine. 2. No, he’s not giving it back....

More than two generations of readers have made Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade their model of the hard-boiled private eye. They have enshrined Spade without knowing much about him. What they have overlooked is his heart. His toughness is leavened by both tenderness and subtlety; he has a feminine sensitivity to atmospheres and textures. Though basically a man of action, he doesn't exhaust his personality in man-talk or high-speed movement…. Hammett's complexity of insight brought ne...