In the 1920s a distinctively American detective fiction emerged from the pages of pulp magazines. The \u201chard-boiled\u201d 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 \u201cclassics\u201d 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 rational and respectable British protagonists (Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, for instance), tough-talking American private eyes relied as much on their fists as their brains as they made their way through tangled plotlines. Casting working-class readers of pulp fiction as \u201cpoachers,\u201d Smith argues that they understood these stories as parables about Taylorism, work, and manhood; as guides to navigating consumer culture; as sites for managing anxieties about working women. Engaged in re-creating white, male privilege for the modern, heterosocial world, pulp detective fiction shaped readers into consumers by selling them what they wanted to hear - stories about manly artisan-heroes who resisted encroaching commodity culture and the female consumers who came with it. Commenting on the genre\u2019s staying power, Smith considers contemporary detective fiction by women, minority, and gay and lesbian writers.

The "Student Study Guide/Solutions Manual," prepared by Erin Smith Berk and Janice Gorzynski Smith, begins each chapter with a detailed chapter review that is organized around chapter goals and key concepts. The Problem Solving section provides a number of examples for solving each type of problem essential to that chapter. The Self-Test section of each chapter quizzes on chapter highlights, with answers provided. Finally, each chapter ends with the solutions to all in-chapter problems, as well as the solutions to all odd-numbered end-of-chapter problems.