Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction the Cold War

Pulp Culture takes the reader on a walk down the Mean Streets of post-war America to investigate the classic texts of American hardboiled crime fiction and the era from which they came. With crooks hiding in every doorway and commies lurking under every bed, crime fiction?its gaudy paperback covers portraying men with guns and women with low necklines?was avidly read by a nation adjusting to the Cold War and the Atomic Era. 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.