“We have all heard the stories — what a tough guy you once were. I wonder, are they true stories?”
So says a curious character to Sam Spade, Clive Owen’s detective in the AMC Networks crime drama Monsieur Spade, premiering on AMC and AMC+ in early 2024.
With Owen as star and executive producer, Monsieur Spade features the return of the hard-boiled private eye from Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon.
As the six-episode series begins, Spade enjoys a peaceful and quiet retirement in Bozouls, a commune in southern France.
“But the rumored return of his old adversary will change everything,” AMC Networks teases in a press release. “Six beloved nuns have been brutally murdered at the local convent. As the town grieves, secrets emerge, and new leads are established. Spade learns that the murders are somehow connected to a mysterious child who is believed to possess great powers.”
The limited series is co-created, written, and executive produced by The Queen’s Gambit EP Scott Frank and Oz creator Tom Fontana, who have five Emmy Awards between them for their writing, directing, and producing work.
Sam Spade previously hit the big screen in the 1931 film The Maltese Falcon, starring Ricardo Cortez as the famous gumshoe, and the better-known 1941 film of the same name, in which Humphrey Bogart played the part.
“Spade has no original,” Hammett wrote in the introduction to the 1934 edition of The Maltese Falcon. “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, 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 get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client.”
In Monsieur Spade, though, the tales of Spade’s bravado are irrelevant — or so he thinks. “No one cares about that Sam Spade anymore,” he tells the inquirer in the new teaser.
Monsieur Spade, Early 2024, AMC and AMC+