Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War

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Serpent's Tail, 1995 - Education - 230 pages
Pulp Culture takes the reader on a walk down the Mean Streets of post-war America to investigate the classic texts of American hardboiled crime fiction and the era from which they came. With crooks hiding in every doorway and commies lurking under every bed, crime fiction?its gaudy paperback covers portraying men with guns and women with low necklines?was avidly read by a nation adjusting to the Cold War and the Atomic Era. Pulp Culture gives post-war crime fiction a political and irreverent reading, examining the politics of paranoia, private detection and criminality; the origins of crime fiction; the role of women in a male-dominated genre; and why the early 1960s marked the final days of classic hardboiled fiction.

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Contents

A Knife that Cuts Both Ways
14
Taking Out Contracts
65
Femme Fatality
106
Copyright

4 other sections not shown

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About the author (1995)

Born in Detroit in 1945, Woody Haut grew up in Pasadena, California, attended San Francisco State University, and has lived in Britain since the early 1970s. Presently a London-based journalist, he has worked as a college lecturer, taxi-cab driver, record shop assistant, cinema programmer and Labour Editor for Rolling Stock magazine (US).

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