Overview

Named one of Kirkus Reviews' Best Indie Books of 2016. For close to fifty years, three masters of the hard-boiled detective novel dispatched intrepid gumshoes into upper-crust homes and seedy back alleys, peeling back and exposing all the pretexts of polite society. Or did they? Were there even closer, darker secrets they never quite copped to? In Hard-Boiled Anxiety, Karen Huston Karydes offers a new and unsettling reading of the classic pairings: Dashiell Hammett and his successive shamuses, the Continental Op, Sam Spade, and Nick Charles; Raymond Chandler and his brooding knight errant, Philip Marlowe; and Ross Macdonald and his 1960s sleuth, Lew Archer. Each novelist harbored ghosts, injuries, and a guilty backstory of his own. Included are remarkable observations from a memoir kept by Ross Macdonald as he underwent psychotherapy in the 1950s, never divulged at this length until the publication of this volume. Sigmund Freud, welcome to Sunset Boulevard.

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9780990938064

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Perusing her compassionate but unsparing accounts of these men's psychic case-histories is often as thrilling an experience as reading their legendary novels. The brilliant Hard-Boiled Anxiety should become a benchmark work in Hammett-Chandler-Macdonald studies. -- Tom Nolan author of Ross Macdonald: A Biography; editor of Ross Macdonald's The Archer Files; and co-editor (with Suzanne Marrs) of Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdo

Author Information

Karen Huston Karydes is acquisitions librarian for the Talbot County Free Library on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. This book is based on her doctoral dissertation from the University of Maryland.

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