What is the name of the detective in 'The Maltese Falcon'?

Sam Spade is the detective in Dashiell Hammett's 'The Maltese Falcon'. He is a San Francisco private investigator who becomes entangled in a violent search for a valuable statuette supposedly shaped like a falcon.

Spade is the protagonist of Hammett's 1930 novel and one of the defining figures of hard-boiled detective fiction. He is cynical, quick-witted, physically capable, and guided by a personal code that does not always match conventional morality. The story begins after his partner, Miles Archer, is killed during an investigation involving the client Brigid O'Shaughnessy.

The character is often mixed up with Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, or Philip Marlowe, but those detectives belong to other fictional traditions. Sam Spade was created specifically for 'The Maltese Falcon'; Hammett had worked as a private detective before becoming a writer, and that experience helped shape the novel's terse dialogue and morally ambiguous world. Humphrey Bogart's performance in the 1941 film adaptation made Spade even more widely known.