Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War

Beginning with Dashiell Hammett testifying before Senator Joseph McCarthy, Pulp Culture pursues the lives and work of crime writers who approached the genre at street level: David Goodis, Chester Himes, Jim Thompson, Dorothy B Hughes, Dolores Hitchens, Leigh Brackett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, Howard Browne, Gil Brewer, William B McGivern, Lionel White, Ross MacDonald, Horace McCoy, Charles Willeford and Charles Williams. Pulp Culture gives post-war crime fiction a political and irreverent reading, examining the politics of paranoia, private detection and criminality; the origins of crime fiction; the role of women in a male-dominated genre; and why the early 1960s marked the final days of classic hardboiled fiction. It also considers the genre's influence on contemporary crime writers and film-makers. Pulp Culture is essential reading for anyone interested in noir writing, films and the post-war era.