Spade In Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon

The protagonist of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, Samuel “Sam” Spade, is a very mysterious man; one who trusts only himself. He solves the problems he encounters alone, and without the help of authority. To him, both the law and ideas of morality impede his work as a detective. This disregard for both written and tacit law leads to assumptions that, as a person, he is wholly amoral, to the extent that he is considered a devil. There are comparisons between him and the devil throughout the novel - The author goes out of his way to refer to Spade as a “blonde Satan”(3). To be sure, Spade is no angel; his sole desire, trumping the well-being of his coworkers and friends, is to outsmart those around him and to emerge victorious in

He lacks the emotion that a normal person might have. When Spade feels challenged, his facial expressions seem to give away nothing. The people around him, be they Effie, Iva, or even Brigid, never have a clear understanding of what he’s thinking. Taking this into consideration, it wouldn’t be far off to assert that he possesses more villainous qualities than heroic, at least

He was able to outsmart everyone, but at the cost of his being alone. He may have won, but he won Iva, a character symbol of loneliness. Spade may not be greedy but he is very selfish. He feels that he is a professional and that causes him to do things that people normally wouldn’t do. There is irony in the way that Spade thinks about himself. He gets angry with Brigid and others for lying to him or trying to trick him, when he’s doing it himself. He is either oblivious to this fact or he feels that only he should be allowed to do such a thing. At the end of the book Brigid expresses her frustration with him for tricking her. “‘Only pretending you cared – to trap me like this? You didn’t care at all? You didn’t – don’t – l – love