Leonard Cassuto is professor of English at Fordham University and an award-winning journalist whose writing has appeared in academic journals and popular periodicals ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Salon.com. He is the author of The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture and the general editor of the forthcoming Cambridge History of the American Novel.

This is an erudite, illuminating and highly readable study Journal of American Studies Cassuto has profitably plowed new ground in this study. It's certain to become an essential document for undersatnding crime fiction's inner workings. African American Review

• Introduction: Sentimentality, Sympathy, Serial Killers (Dashiell Hammett, Charles Willeford, and others) Part I. Revising the Roots of the Hard-Boiled Tradition: The 1920s 1. Crime and Sympathy (Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway) 2. Hammett and the Hard-Boiled Sentimental Part II. Reading the Hard-Boiled Sentimental: From the Thirties to the Fifties 3. Depression Domesticity (James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler. Also Horace McCoy, Damon Runyon, Erskine Caldwell) 4. The Sentimental Action Hero in Cold War Crime Stories (Raymond Chandler, David Goodis, John D. MacDonald, William P. McGivern, Wade Miller, John Evans [aka Howard Browne]. Also Cornell Woolrich, Mickey Spillane, Gil Brewer) 5. Sentimental Perversion: The Canonized Nonconformists of the Fifties (Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith) Part III: Crime Fiction at the Sentimental Apocalypse: The Rise of the Hard-Boiled Domestic Detective and the Serial Killer from the Sixties to the Present 6. The Homely Heart of the Hard-Boiled: Ross Macdonald and John D. MacDonald (Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Robert B. Parker, Robert Bloch) 7. Hard-Boiled Therapists, Hard-Boiled Women, and a Vigilante (Thomas Harris, Lawrence Block, James Lee Burke, Sue Grafton, and others) 8. Shades of Professional Sympathy: Race, Crime, Detection (Chester Himes, Walter Mosley, William P. McGivern, Dennis Lehane, and others) 9. The Rise of the Serial Killer (Robert Finnegan, Truman Capote, Thomas Harris. Also Robert Bloch, John D. MacDonald, Dean Koontz, Gil Brewer, Alice Sebold, and others) Notes Selected Bibliography Acknowledgments Index