Hard-Boiled Anxiety

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Product Details
Price
$24.95  $23.20
Publisher
Secant Publishing LLC
Publish Date
Pages
226
Dimensions
5.8 X 8.2 X 1.0 inches | 0.8 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9780990938064

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About the Author
For close to fifty years, three masters of the hard-boiled detective novel dispatched intrepid gumshoes into upper-crust homes and seedy back alleys, peeling back and exposing all the pretexts of polite society. Or did they? Were there even closer, darker secrets they never quite copped to? In Hard-Boiled Anxiety, Karen Huston Karydes offers a new and unsettling reading of the classic pairings: Dashiell Hammett and his successive shamuses, the Continental Op, Sam Spade, and Nick Charles; Raymond Chandler and his brooding knight errant, Philip Marlowe; and Ross Macdonald and his 1960s sleuth, Lew Archer. Each novelist, though celebrated in the American pantheon, harbored ghosts, injuries, and a guilty backstory of his own. Their fictional detectives served as doubles, in ways both flamboyant and subtle, as the authors wrestled inner demons and labored, in Karydes's words, to "write themselves well." Included are remarkable observations from a memoir kept by Ross Macdonald as he underwent psychotherapy in the 1950s, never divulged at this length until the publication of this volume. Sigmund Freud, welcome to Sunset Boulevard.
Reviews
Curl up on the analyst's couch with all your favorite mystery scribes, as Karen Huston Karydes sleuths out the neurotic, personal threads that make up the warp and the weft of their greatest fictions. A dark, yet illuminating read. -- Kim Cooper "author of The Raymond Chandler Map of Los Angeles and The Kept Girl"
Perusing her compassionate but unsparing accounts of these men's psychic case-histories is often as thrilling an experience as reading their legendary novels. The brilliant Hard-Boiled Anxiety should become a benchmark work in Hammett-Chandler-Macdonald studies. -- Tom Nolan "author of Ross Macdonald: A Biography; editor of Ross Macdonald's The Archer Files; and co-editor (with Suzanne Marrs) of Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdo"