Adventures of Sam Spade

The Adventures of Sam Spade featured Howard Duff as tough-guy private detective Spade and Lurene Tuttle as his secretary, Effie Perene. The show typically opens with Spade calling his secretary, promising to come to the office to write a report on his most recent case. He then narrates the story in the first person. The show was extremely popular until Duff fell victim to Senator Joseph McCarthy's Red Scare of the early 1950s.

The characters were taken from Dashiell Hammett's story, The Maltese Falcon, written in 1929 and published as a novel in 1930. Hammett was arguably the father of the hard-boiled detective and this story is considered a classic of the genre. It has been adopted for movies several times, the most famous (and the best) being the 1941 film starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor.

For more information, see Thrilling Detective.

Series description provided by Frank Bell.