Photo: Al Seib/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images (1996)
Sample of authors
Burke, James Lee
James Lee Burke is an American author of Irish descent born in Houston, Texas, and brought up on the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast. His father died in a road accident when James Lee Burke was eighteen years old. Burke enrolled at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette, in 1955 and transferred to the University of Missouri, Columbia, in 1957, where he read journalism and graduated with...
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.