Sam Spade Tag

‘Monsieur Spade’ and the Faustian Bargain I’ve been reading Ed Simon’s “Devil’s Contract,” about the history of the Faustian bargain, while watching AMC’s six-episode mini-series “Monsieur Spade,” which transplants Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade to the South of France in the 1960s, and that combination has sparked a peculiar line of thought: the fictional private detective is a Faustian figure. Seen from that angle, the detective is something of an emissary, coming to collect on the devil’s behalf. Maybe you killed someone for a fortune, and even got away with it forRead More