Hard-Boiled Sentimentality

by Cassuto, Leonard

• ISBN13: 9780231126908
• ISBN10: 0231126905
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-10-20
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

Leonard Cassuto's cultural history of the hard-boiled crime genre recovers the fascinating link between tough guys and sensitive women. The testosterone-saturated heroes of American crime fiction owe a debt to the nineteenth-century sentimental novel. Ranging from classics like "The Big Sleep" and "The Talented Mr. Ripley" to neglected paperback gems, Leonard Cassuto chronicles his dialogue -centered on the power of sympathy -between self-consciously masculine American crime stories and American literature's most female genre. Cassuto moves smoothly from Sam Spade to Hannibal Lecter against the backdrop of the sweeping social changes of the twentieth century and ends with a startling link between today's serial killer stories and the domestic fictions of long ago.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Sentimentality, Sympathy, Serial Killers

Revising the Roots of the Hard-Boiled Tradition: The 1920s

Crime and Sympathy

Hammett and the Hard-Boiled Sentimental

Reading the Hard-Boiled Sentimental: From the Thirties to the Fifties

Depression Domesticity

The Sentimental Action Hero in Cold War Crime Stories

Sentimental Perversion: The Canonized Nonconformists of the Fifties

Crime Fiction at the Sentimental Apocalypse: The Rise of the Hard-Boiled Domestic Detective and the Serial Killer from the Sixties to the Present

The Homely Heart of the Hard-Boiled: Ross Macdonald and John D. MacDonald

Hard-Boiled Therapists

Shades of Professional Sympathy: Race

The Rise of the Serial Killer

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

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