Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir

by John T. Irwin

Book Overview

Early in the twentieth century a new character type emerged in the crime novels of American writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler: the "hard-boiled" detective, most famously exemplified by Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Unlike the analytical detectives of nineteenth-century fiction, such as Edgar Allan Poe's Inspector Dupin, the new detectives encountered cases not as intricate logical puzzles but as stark challenges of...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801890802
• ISBN13: 9780801890802
• Release Date: November 2008
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.8" x 8.7"