Hard-Boiled

by Smith, Erin A.

• ISBN13: 9781566397681
• ISBN10: 1566397685
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-05-12
• Publisher: Temple Univ Pr

Summary

In the 1920s a distinctively American detective fiction emerged from the pages of pulp magazines. The "hard-boiled" stories published in Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and Clues featured a new kind of hero and soon challenged the popularity of the British mysteries that held readers in thrall on both sides of the Atlantic. In Hard-Boiled Erin A. Smith examines the culture that produced and supported this form of detective story through the 1940s.

Relying on pulp magazine advertising, the memoirs of writers and publishers, Depression-era studies of adult reading habits, social and labor history, Smith offers an innovative account of how these popular stories were generated and read. She shows that although the work of pulp fiction authors like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner have become "classics" of popular culture, the hard-boiled genre was dominated by hack writers paid by the word, not self-styled artists. Pulp magazine editors and writers emphasized a gritty realism in the new genre. Unlike the highly ra

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(14)
PART I: Reconstructing Readers	15	(60)
The Hard-Boiled Writer and the Literary Marketplace	18	(25)
The Adman on the Shop Floor: Workers, Consumer Culture, and the Pulps	43	(32)
PART II: Reading Hard-Boiled Fiction	75	(92)
Proletarian Plots	79	(24)
Dressed to Kill	103	(23)
Talking Tough	126	(24)
The Office Wife	150	(17)
Afterword	167	(8)
Notes	175	(36)
Index	211