Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
1. "Where Their Best Interest Lies": Hammett's The Maltese Falcon
2. Being Boss: Chandler's The Big Sleep
3. Beating the Boss: Cain's Double Indemnity
4. Who's the Boss? W. R. Burnett's High Sierra
5. Deadline at Midnight: Cornell Woolrich's Night Has a Thousand Eyes
6. A Puzzle of Character
7. Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir
8. Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir, Continued
Afterword
Notes
Index

About the Author

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.

Reviews

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.
—Patrick O'Donnell, 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.
—Brian Diemert, Journal of Popular Culture

Persuasively locates the development of noir out of the quintessentially American genre of hard-boiled detective fiction.
—Thomas Hibbs, Books and Culture