Unless the Threat of Death is Behind Them

The noted literary critic delves into the psychology and significance of American hardboiled crime fiction and film noir of the 1930s and ’40s. Early in the twentieth century, American crime novelists like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler put forward a new kind of character: the “hard-boiled” detective, as exemplified by Sam Spade in  The Maltese Falcon . Unlike the analytical detectives of nineteenth-century fiction, these new detectives encountered cases not as intricate logical puzz