A literary examination of the influence of 19th-century sleuths on the early hard-boiled investigators, this book explores the importance of works by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the development of detective series by Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Brett Halliday, Mickey Spillane, Thomas B. Dewey, Ross Macdonald, Richard S. Prather and William Campbell Gault. Authors from the transitional (1964-1977) and modern periods (1979 to the present) are also discussed to show the ongoing influence of the 19th century detective writers.

Most of George Gissing's 23 novels have a certain air of autobiography, despite Gissing's frequent arguments that his fictional plots bear little resemblance to his own life and experiences. Starting with ""Workers in the Dawn"" (1880), almost all of Gissing's fictional works are set in his own time period of late - Victorian England, and five of his first six novels focus on the working-class poor that Gissing would have encountered frequently during his early writing career.While most recent criticism focuses on Gissing's works as biographical narratives, this work approaches Gissing's novels as purely imaginative works of art, giving him the benefit of the doubt regardless of how well his books seem to match up with the events of his own life. By analyzing important themes in his novels and recognizing the power of the artist's imagination, especially through the critical works of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, the author reveals how Gissing's novels present a lived feel of the world Gissing knew firsthand. The author asserts that, at most, Gissing used his personal experiences as a starting point to transform his own life and thoughts into stories that explain the social, personal, and cultural significance of such experiences.

This work explores John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series, with special emphasis on MacDonald's examination of the conflicts and joys of twentieth-century American culture and society. MacDonald describes himself as a moralist and this, combined with his narrative gifts, infuses his ever-present concerns for the quality and durability of American life. The first and last chapters, respectively, discuss MacDonald's early novels and the four he wrote concurrently with the series. The remaining chapters analyze various themes that figure prominently in the series. MacDonald's thinking reflects many of the concerns of his fellow citizens during his writing career while revealing his own personal reaction to the society around him. Noting his sense of an uncaused evil in the world and his prolific inventiveness, this work examines MacDonald's narrative exploration of America in which he reveals an unwillingness to give up either his frequently pessimistic views of society or the hope that it can somehow continue. His posthumous Reading for Survival sounds the latter note in typical MacDonald fashion: Read and learn or die. McGee, in the hard-boiled detective tradition, exemplifies MacDonald's picture of the struggling, but coping, culture with no guarantees for the future.

The hard-boiled private detective is among the most recognizable characters in popular fiction since the 1920s - a tough product of a violent world, in which police forces are inadequate and people with money can choose private help when facing threatening circumstances. Though a relatively recent arrival, the hard-boiled detective has undergone steady development and assumed diverse forms. This critical study analyzes the character of the hard-boiled detective, from literary antecedents through the early 21st century. It follows change in the novels through three main periods: the Early (roughly 1927-1955), during which the character was defined by such writers as Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler; the Transitional, evident by 1964 in the works of John D. MacDonald and Michael Collins, and continuing to around 1977 via Joseph Hansen, Bill Pronzini and others; and the Modern, since the late 1970s, during which such writers as Loren D. Estleman, Liza Cody, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton and many others have expanded the genre and the detective character. Themes such as violence, love and sexuality, friendship, space and place, and work are examined throughout the text.