The Maltese Falcon is a 1929 detective novel by Dashiell Hammett, originally serialized in the magazine Black Mask beginning with the September 1929 issue. The story has been adapted several times for the cinema. The main character, Sam Spade, appears in this novel only and in three lesser known short stories, yet is widely cited as the crystallizing figure in the development of the hard-boiled private detective genre. Raymond Chandler's character Philip Marlowe, for instance, was strongly influenced by Hammett's Spade. Spade was a departure from Hammett's nameless detective, The Continental Op. Sam Spade combined several features of previous detectives, most notably his cold detachment, keen eye for detail, and unflinching determination to achieve his own justice. The novel contains a considerable amount of homosexual subtext concerning Wilmer Cook and Joel Cairo (Cairo is also referred to as the "Levantine"), all of which was excised, due to Production Code restraints, from the 1941 film version starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor, the best known of three films between 1931 and 1941 about Hammett's novel. The briefly-seen character of Rhea Gutman, who has no backstory, does not appear in either the 1931 or 1941 film.