Two of my idols—Dashiell Hammett and Clive Owen—have created "must-see" TV.
As much as I loved Clive Owen in the film Gosford Park, I flipped over him in Closer. I could see why Julia Roberts and Natalie Portman would too.
But before I discovered Monsieur Owen, I fell in love with Dashiell Hammett's stories.
I was in my twenties. There's something about the needle sharp rat-tat-tat dialogue of his heroes—Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe—that thrills me, especially when some femme fatale is his target. Is she an angel in distress, or a devil in high heels? Is he falling for her line, or has he already figured that she's part of the problem and that any solution he's already been paid to find will inevitably cost him more than his retainer?
As for the new TV series, Monsieur Spade, it leapfrogs beyond the books' timeline—the 1930s and ‘40s—into the South of France in the early ’60s. There, Sam finds and loses the love of his life, though viewers see the who, why, and how in flashbacks.
To add to that, Bridget O'Shaughnessy—the now deceased femme fatale from his most famous story, The Maltese Falcon—has paid him to deliver her seven-year-old daughter to her ne'er-do-well father. Unable to find the man, Sam places her in a convent instead...
Then all hell breaks loose.
Yes, you'll love it.
You can read the first seven Sam Spade stories here:
Or you can get the first of the Sam Spade audiobooks here, from Chirp.
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