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 new depths and tints to Black Mask fiction. These make Falcon a subtle study of moral behavior and of degrees of emotional commitment and stress. (p. 367)
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