Photo: Simone Padovani/Awakening/Getty Images (2017)
Sample of authors
Kutscher, Volker
The German author Volker Kutscher was born in Lindlar and grew up in Wipperfürth near Köln (Cologne). He studied Germanic Languages, Philosophy and History in Köln and Wupperthal. Parallel with his work as a journalist, in the 1990s he started to write detective stories, at first together with another author, Christian Schnalke. Kutscher is now a full-time writer and lives in Köln.
The first nov...
Literary figures
Sam Spade
Gender: Male
Dashiell Hammett only wrote one novel and a few short stories about the American private detective Sam Spade. The Maltese Falcon, however, is a major classic and like some of his short stories it is the precursor of the hardboiled detective story. The cynical, tough and outright rude Spade and his personal habits are so often copied that they have become clichés.