New Hard-Boiled Writers: 1970s-1990s

Beginning in the 1970s a new generation of writers took over the hard-boiled story created by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and remade it to fit the realities of their world. Theirs is a world infected by epidemics of violence, greed, racism, sexism, war, and commercialism. Their heroes, too, are far different from Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.

With an eye toward the origins and development of the hard-boiled story, LeRoy Lad Panek comments both on the way it has changed over the past three decades and examines the work of ten significant contemporary hard-boiled writers. Chapters on Robert B. Parker, James Crumley, Loren Estleman, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Carl Hiaasen, Earl Emerson, Robert Crais, James Lee Burke, and Walter Mosley show how the new writers have used the hard-boiled story and the hard-boiled hero to make powerful statements about reality in the last quarter of the twentieth century.