Introduction: Sentimentality, Sympathy, Serial Killers (Dashiell Hammett, Charles Willeford, and others) Part I. Revising the Roots of the Hard-Boiled Tradition: The 1920s 1. Crime and Sympathy (Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway) 2. Hammett and the Hard-Boiled Sentimental Part II. Reading the Hard-Boiled Sentimental: From the Thirties to the Fifties 3. Depression Domesticity (James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler. Also Horace McCoy, Damon Runyon, Erskine Caldwell) 4. The Sentimental Action Hero in Cold War Crime Stories (Raymond Chandler, David Goodis, John D. MacDonald, William P. McGivern, Wade Miller, John Evans [aka Howard Browne]. Also Cornell Woolrich, Mickey Spillane, Gil Brewer) 5. Sentimental Perversion: The Canonized Nonconformists of the Fifties (Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith) Part III: Crime Fiction at the Sentimental Apocalypse: The Rise of the Hard-Boiled Domestic Detective and the Serial Killer from the Sixties to the Present 6. The Homely Heart of the Hard-Boiled: Ross Macdonald and John D. MacDonald (Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Robert B. Parker, Robert Bloch) 7. Hard-Boiled Therapists, Hard-Boiled Women, and a Vigilante (Thomas Harris, Lawrence Block, James Lee Burke, Sue Grafton, and others) 8. Shades of Professional Sympathy: Race, Crime, Detection (Chester Himes, Walter Mosley, William P. McGivern, Dennis Lehane, and others) 9. The Rise of the Serial Killer (Robert Finnegan, Truman Capote, Thomas Harris. Also Robert Bloch, John D. MacDonald, Dean Koontz, Gil Brewer, Alice Sebold, and others) Notes Selected Bibliography Acknowledgments Index
"Leonard Cassuto's thesis is both original and intriguing, and the case he makes for it well-constructed and convincing. I'm looking at crime fiction and film differently since I read this book. Highly recommended." -- S.J. Rozan, Edgar Award-winning novelist and author of In This Rain "This will be the all too rare academic book that purchasers actually read from cover to cover. Cassuto has put together a captivating body of material, a groundbreaking approach, top-drawer scholarly skills and instincts, and a splendid writing style." -- Catherine Nickerson, author of Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women "To this developing body of scholarship, Leonard Cassuto adds an encyclopedic grasp of the developmental history of the literature, and he discusses it with refreshing clarity and an engaging prose style. The book should be widely read and will almost certainly become the definitive work on its subject." -- Sean McCann, Wesleyan University, author of Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism
Leonard Cassuto is professor of English at Fordham University and an award-winning journalist whose writing has appeared in academic journals and popular periodicals ranging from The Wall Street Journal to Salon.com. He is the author of The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture and the general editor of the forthcoming, Cambridge History of the American Novel. www.lcassuto.com.
This is an erudite, illuminating and highly readable study Journal of American Studies Cassuto has profitably plowed new ground in this study. It's certain to become an essential document for undersatnding crime fiction's inner workings. African American Review
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
