>
>Sam Spade is the Gamester. His name refers to
gambling. The gamble is a
>Life and Death struggle; that helps make the Flitcraft
parable so
>important. His facial feature--the inverted V, that he
is "a blonde
>Satan"--make him a good witch (or warlock.) Lots of
mythological
symbolisms here.
In examining some of the apparently odd clues to Spade's
character, we
can't forget that Hammett was a bit of an autodidact--he
boned up
thoroughly on Western lit while recovering from his bouts of
TB. In
writing his stories, he had tumbling in his brain all his
critical takes
on literature and a desire to use in his own work what he'd
learned from
his reading.
The placement of some of the details he drops in may seem
jarring to us,
but he was working toward being original and doing something
that hadn't
really been done well--if at all--in the genre of pulp
writing he was
striving in.
--Duane
>
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