Hard-boiled sentimentality: the secret history of American crime stories

Introduction : sentimentality, sympathy, serial killers : Dashiell Hammett, Charles Willeford, and others

Revising the roots of the hard-boiled tradition : the 1920s. Crime and sympathy : Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway ; Hammett and the hard-boiled sentimental

Reading the hard-boiled sentimental : from the thirties to the fifties. Depression domesticity : James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, also Horace McCoy, Damon Runyon, Erskine Caldwell ; 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 ; Sentimental perversion : the canonized nonconformists of the fifties : Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith

Crime fiction at the sentimental apocalypse : the rise of the hard-boiled domestic detective and the serial killer from the sixties to the present. The homely heart of the hard-boiled : Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Robert B. Parker, Robert Bloch ; Hard-boiled therapists, hard-boiled women, and a vigilante : Thomas Harris, Lawrence Block, James Lee Burke, Sue Grafton, and others ; Shade of professional sympathy : race, crime, detection : Chester Himes, Walter Mosley, William P. McGivern, Dennis Lehane, and others ; 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.