I’m keeping a falcon-like eye on the current Jeopardy! battle of the super-champions, to see if Hammett pops up. I bet they all know the difference between Hammett’s Sam Spade and Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.
But on January 7 in the regular season (S36E87) the long-standing confusion between the two dicks surfaced yet again.
Category: Soft Words. $400 slot:
“The Long Goodbye” finds this gumshoe describing various blondes, including a shadowy one who “speaks softly out of nowhere.”
First to ring in said, “Who is Sam Spade?”
Wrong.
The champion of the moment picked it up with the correct response: “Who is Philip Marlowe?”
