New Hard-Boiled Writers: 1970s-1990s

Beginning in the 1970s, a new generation of writers took over the hard-boiled story (created by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett) and transformed it to fit the realities of their world-a universe infected by violence, greed, racism, sexism, war, and commercialism. Their protagonists, too, are far different from Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.
The author comments both on the way the hard-boiled story has changed over the past three decades and examines the work of ten significant contemporary hard-boiled writers. Chapters on Robert B. Parker, James Crumley, Loren Estleman, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Carl Hiaasen, Earl Emerson, Robert Crais, James Lee Burke, and Walter Mosley demonstrate how these writers have used the hard-boiled hero to make powerful statements about life in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Author: Leroy Lad Panek
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: 01/01/2000
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.18lbs
Size: 9.46h x 6.24w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780879728205

Review Citation(s):
Reference and Research Bk News 02/01/2001 pg. 196