Hard-Boiled Sentimentality

Leonard Cassuto's cultural history of the hard-boiled crime genre recovers the fascinating link between tough guys and sensitive women. The testosterone-saturated heroes of American crime fiction owe a debt to the nineteenth-century sentimental novel. Ranging from classics like "The Big Sleep" and "The Talented Mr. Ripley" to neglected paperback gems, Leonard Cassuto chronicles his dialogue -centered on the power of sympathy -between self-consciously masculine American crime stories and American literature's most female genre. Cassuto moves smoothly from Sam Spade to Hannibal Lecter against the backdrop of the sweeping social changes of the twentieth century and ends with a startling link between today's serial killer stories and the domestic fictions of long ago.