‘Monsieur Spade’ and the Faustian Bargain

Clive Owen is judging you from here.

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 a rich man for a fortune, and even got away with it for a few decades; now someone’s at your door with his fedora and notebook and hip flask, the cigarette in his mouth cocked at an insouciant angle, and he’s ready to send you to ride Old Sparky—unless you prefer one last shootout, of course. Perhaps Hammett considered this subtext when he described Spade in “The Maltese Falcon” as an almost devilish figure, his brow and nostrils angled into sharp v’s like a cartoon Satan.