Word: spadefuls
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...esque parodies. Ford, a natural descendent of Chandler's tough but tender-hearted heroes, runs into more than one beautiful killer between shoot-outs. In Blade Runner, however, the ladies' stone-cold hearts are usually a symptom of automation, which takes the edge off the romance. The monotone Sam Spade narration also becomes ridiculous and does little to characterize a hero who relies on frequent drunken debauches to reveal his emotional depth. The poor guy is clearly troubled, but the theatrical shorthand of empty, albeit exotic, liquor bottles and frequent comments about how lousy it is to be a killer...
...anguish will heal finally, and maybe the nation's pain be eased too, when ground is broken in a few days on the Washington Mall for the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial. Fifty men who fought in the war will each turn a spade of earth on a spot of hallowed ground 75 yards from Constitution Avenue. The site is by design beneath the gaze of Abraham Lincoln, who held the Union together, and in the morning shadow of the Washington Monument, commemorating the man who guided the Revolution. It is ground where the Viet Nam protesters marched and tented...
...Spade had no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and what quite a few of them in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not--or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague--want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to best anybody he comes in contact with...
...Pinkerton code, as filtered through such greats as Sam Spade, consisted of three parts--anonvmity, morality and objectivity. None of them were quite what they seemed. A good detective had to be anonymous, but not only so he wouldn't be seen--the less personal information there was, the less anyone could hold against him. A Pinkerton operative, or "Op" as he was known, was identified by number, and his final report to his client was ofter rewritten by someone else entirely. Morality was similarly skewed. In simple terms, his job was to protect good people from bad people...
...fiction filled a gap between the elegant puzzles of the Conan Doyle school and the dumb gore and violence of the pulp magazines. Typical Hammett detectives, like the Continental op and Sam Spade, got their hands dirty but kept their minds alert. They often found that those who had hired them were criminal or corrupt; they prowled, lonely paladins of justice, through stark landscapes of betrayal and greed. Hammett's stories paid the rent. His novels, especially The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Glass Key (1931), brought him an international reputation...