American Crime Fiction (eBook)

Peter Swirski is a Canadian scholar and literary critic featured in Canadian Who's Who. Specialist in American literature and American studies, and Amazon's #1 Bestseller in American Literature, American History and Criticism, and Canadian Literary Criticism, he is the author of sixteen award-winning books, including the staple of American popular culture studies From Lowbrow to Nobrow (2005); a trio of bestsellers on American literature, culture, and politics: Ars Americana, Ars Politica (2010); American Utopia and Social Engineering (2011), and American Political Fictions (2015); and a tour de force on thinking and creative computers From Literature to Biterature (2013).

TABLE OF CONTENTS List of IllustrationsCHAPTER 1. Nobrow: Contents and Discontents The Most Ossified Popular Genre of All—Of the Standard of Taste—Flogging a Dead Horse—Damned If You Do and Damned If You Don’t—Heads I Win, Tails You Lose—Vice and Its Victim—Beachbooks for Intellectuals—Sex, Money, and Revenge    CHAPTER 2. Briefcases for Hire: Dashiell Hammett and John Grisham The Pauper and the Prince—The Toast of Hollywood—Waldron Honeywell—Who Framed Roger Rabbit?—Pow, You Are There— Seven Thousand Liquor Cases—Vacant Niche in the Market—The Banzhaf Bandits—Worst of Pages—Exhibit A— One Part Hammett, Two Parts Grisham CHAPTER 3. Boilerplate Potboilers: William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway Good God, I Can’t Publish This—Guts and Genitals—Southern Gothic—Murder Capital of the United States—Sanctuary Much—Worse than Dresden—Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?—.38 Police Special—The Great American Paradox CHAPTER 4. The Not So Simple Art of Murder: Raymond Chandler No Chinaman Must Figure in the Story—Mayhem Spiced with Nymphomania—A Bombshell Redhead on the Run—The Is to Was Man—Pirandello Minus the Obtrusiveness—At Odds with the Canon—Wise Man, Wink, Wink—A Whodunit Without a Dunit—The Great Wrong Place—Anytown, USA—I Cannot Work or Sleep Till I Have Finished It CHAPTER 5. The Urban Procedural: Ed McBain Big Lights, Big City—Salvatore Albert Lombino—Graphic and Photographic—The Worst in Christendom—Colonel Mustard and Lady Buxom—M*E*T*R*O*P*O*L*I*S*—Nothing but a Woman—Mischief—The N Word—Behind the Thin Blue Line—Crime and the City CHAPTER 6. Take Two: Nelson DeMille and F. Scott Fitzgerald Eppolito and Caracappa—Jack Cannon—Trouble Brews in Happy Valley—All Its Watches Limp—Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia—The Most Dangerous Country in the World—Take Two—We Keep You Clean in Muscatine—American Dream BIBLIOGRAPHY