What is literary noir? How do British and American noir thrillers relate to their historical contexts? In considering such questions, this study ranges over hundreds of novels, analysing the politics and poetics of noir from the hard-boiled fiction of Hammett, Chandler and Cain to the exciting diversity of nineties thrillers, with sections on the tough investigators, gangsters and victims of the Depression years: the first-person killers, femmes fatales and black protagonists of mid-century; the game-players, voyeurs and consumers of contemporary thrillers and future noir.

Autorentext
LEE HORSLEY is Reader in Literature and Culture at Lancaster University, UK. Her publications include Political Fiction and the Historical Imagination (1990), Fictions of Power in English Literature 1900-1950 (1995) and Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (2005). She is currently co-editing the Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction.

Inhalt
Dedication List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction PART I: 1920-45 Hard-boiled Investigators Big-shot Gangsters and Small-time Crooks Victims of Circumstance PART II: 1945-70 Fatal Men Fatal Women Strangers and Outcasts PART III: 1970-2000 Players, Voyeurs and Consumers Pasts and Futures Bibliography Index