Digging Up Sam Spade
What's the point of writing 'your take' on a famous character?
When you write a novel, you’re making hundreds of decisions: everything from character names to adjective choice to plot points. This granularity can terrify you if you let it—I have a hard time reading George Saunders’ “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain,” his ostensibly helpful picking-apart of the Russian greats’ short stories, because of how it reveals the almost unfathomable complexities within, say, a single paragraph of Chekhov.
Fortunately, the subconscious makes many of the decisions for you while you’re writing. If you’ve read and written (and lived) enough, your brain instinctively knows what works best for your narrative; even if you don’t nail everything in the first draft, you can usually trust that you’ve set the right scaffolding for your future work.
It also means that your characters are uniquely yours; nobody else can make the same decisions as you on the page. Which brings me to my point: trying to revive dead authors’ famous characters is a really bad idea if you value the original works.
Why am I bringing this up? Because Max Allan Collins is reviving Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade in a novel, “Return of the Maltese Falcon,” set to be published by Hard Case Crime in January 2026. It’s not the first time in recent memory that someone’s dug up ol’ Spade and tried to send him grumbling after a new case—a little while back, AMC gifted us with the handsomely produced, grindingly grim “Monsieur Spade” mini-series. Collins hopes that audiences “will enjoy and accept this effort as a kind of love letter to Dashiell Hammett and the private eye form,” according to CrimeReads.
Collins is something of an old hand at this kind of thing; he wrote the Dick Tracy comic strip after Chester Gould, and he continued the Mike Hammer series after Mickey Spillane went to that great dive bar in the sky. I’m not here to question his writing ability; I was a fan of his “Road to Perdition” long before the movie came out, and I even liked “Masquerade for Murder,” one of his most recent Mike Hammer riffs, despite my hilariously outsized dislike of Spillane as an author and Hammer as a character.
But this isn’t about writing quality—it’s about the underlying principle of the thing. Collins isn’t Hammett, just like all the authors commissioned over the years to write new Philip Marlowe or James Bond or Hercule Poirot books aren’t Chandler, Fleming, or Christie. It’s all simulacrums of varying quality, at which point you need to ask yourself: what’s the point? Why dilute someone else’s famous, distinctive character with your own alien decisions and preferences when you can just think up your own plots and people?
The answer, of course, is money. Tell a publisher that you’ve written a book about a 19th century detective of your own creation, and your odds of holding their attention aren’t great unless you can throw in a dynamite strange attractor; but tell them that you can, in executive-speak, “mine bestselling IP to continue a classic franchise with four-quadrant appeal,” and suddenly more ears perk up. Got to sell those units, extend those movie options, make those quarterly numbers.
But that doesn’t make it right. The term ‘literary grave robbing’ seems a bit harsh, but it also doesn’t seem wrong.
This is a first even for me, after a professional writing career that began in 1971: a book that gets negative reviews before it has been published or read by anybody. The idea that I wrote this novel as a cash grab is news to me, since my advance was in the mid four figures. As famous as THE FALCON is, it is nonetheless a book published almost a century ago. Now I learn that I'm a buzzard picking the bones of a dead author, and one of your commenters calls me a "fanboy," which at my age is kind of good to hear. My suggestion is this: when RETURN OF THE MALTESE FALCON becomes available, buy it or don't buy it -- read it or don't read it, for whatever your motivation might be. Please don't tell me what mine was.
It will sell, no doubt about it. I like Collins when he does Quarry or Nate Heller. The temptation to step into Spade must be high, and Collins has the chops to make it work, BUT... like you said, "dilution" - it's the washer/dryer thing. That bright T-shirt fades with each laundry cycle. Our Entertainment Industrial Complex sucks all the colors out until the "product" is uniformly gray. The saddest thing for me is that Sam is reduced to a generic icon or worse "a concept" that has become entirely separate from the writer who gave him birth and made him uniquely Hammett's - the things that happened in Dash's brain and cannot be replicated. So, let's be honest, it's not a "return" it's a different animal with a hybrid DNA. Hopefully people will reread the original ...