Hard-Boiled: Working class readers and pulp magazines

In the 1920s a distinctively American detective fiction emerged from the pages of pulp magazines. The hard-boiled stories published in Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly and Clues featured a new kind of hero and soon challenged the popularity of the British mysteries that held readers in thrall on both sides of the Atlantic. In Hard-Boiled, Erin A. Smith examines the culture that produced and supported this form of detective story through the 1940s.

An examination of the culture that produced and supported pulp-fiction