The hard-boiled style of detective fiction emerged in America in the years after the First World War. In the late 1940s, following the Depression, the New Deal, and the Second World War, a new generation of young writers revisited the conventions governing the fictional private eye, and began to move him (the tough detective was still always male) and his world in new directions. This book examines the work of the four most important writers of this second generation of hard-boiled fiction. It offers the first substantial literary analysis of the Max Thursday novels of Wade Miller and the Carney Wilde novels of Bart Spicer, and it develops new perspectives on the well-known Mike Hammer novels of Mickey Spillane and the Lew Archer novels of Ross Macdonald. A particular focus is upon the theme of the detective's status as a loner who succeeds in discovering truth and achieving justice because he works outside organized social structures.

This book focuses on the distinctive role that artists have played in detective fiction-as detectives, as villains and victims, and as bystanders. With a few significant exceptions, literary detectives have always identified themselves as essentially the deconstructors of the artful crimes of others. They may use various methods-ratiocinative, scientific, or hard-boiled-but they always unravel the threads that the villains have woven into deceptive covers for their crimes. The detective does, in the end, produce a work of art: a narrative that explains everything that needs explanation. But the detective's moral work is often juxtaposed to the aesthetic work of the painters, poets, and writers that the detective encounters during an investigation. The author surveys this juxtaposition in works by important authors from the early development of the genre (Poe, Doyle), the golden age (Bentley, Christie, Sayers, James, et al.), and the hard-boiled era (Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald, Spicer et al.).

The Judge Dee Novels provides a comprehensive survey of Robert van Gulik's series of novels (1949-1968) featuring the Tang dynasty magistrate, Judge Dee. In addition to providing a synopsis of each of the Judge Dee stories (with commentaries on the plots, the characters, and the thematic and historical aspects of each story), it examines van Gulik's achievement in two significant, related contexts: the development of detective fiction (both Chinese and Western) and the image of China in popular American literature of the twentieth century.