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 Dupin, the new detectives encountered cases not as
intricate logical puzzles but as stark challenges to manhood. In
the stories of these characters and their criminal opposites, John
T. Irwin explores the tension within ideas of American masculinity
between subordination and independence and, for the man who becomes
"his own boss," the conflict between professional codes and
personal desires.
"Irwin succeeds in presenting his topic with the intellectual
cachet it deserves." -- Choice
"Irwin gracefully and successfully accomplishes the critic's
most worthy task -- to return us happily to the scene of the
crime." -- Modernism/Modernity
"Stimulating... Irwin's psychoanalytic criticism offers subtle
readings of the novels, their adaptations, and of the relations
between these texts and their authors' lives." -- Journal of
Popular Culture
"Persuasively locates the development of noir out of the
quintessentially American genre of hard-boiled detective fiction."
-- Books and Culture
John T. Irwin is the Decker Professor in the Humanities at the
Johns Hopkins University, where he formerly served as chair of the
Writing Seminars. His previous books include The Mystery to a
Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story, recipient
of the Modern Language Association's Scaglione Prize for
Comparative Literary Studies and Phi Beta Kappa's Christian
GaussPrize.
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