Early in the twentieth century a new character type emerged in the crime novels of American writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler: the "hard-boiled" detective, most famously exemplified by Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Unlike the analytical detectives of nineteenth-century fiction, such as Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin, the new detectives encountered cases not as intricate logical puzzles but as stark challenges to manhood. In the stories of these characters and their criminal opposites, John T. Irwin explores the tension within ideas of American masculinity between subordination and independence and, for the man who becomes "his own boss," the conflict between professional codes and personal desires.

"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." -- 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." -- Journal of Popular Culture

"Persuasively locates the development of noir out of the quintessentially American genre of hard-boiled detective fiction." -- Books and Culture

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 and Phi Beta Kappa's Christian Gauss Prize.