In Gumshoe America Sean McCann offers a bold new account of the hard-boiled crime story and its literary and political significance. Illuminating a previously unnoticed set of concerns at the heart of the fiction, he contends that mid-twentieth-century American crime writers used the genre to confront and wrestle with many of the paradoxes and disappointments of New Deal liberalism. For these authors, the same contradictions inherent in liberal democracy were present within the changing literary marketplace of the mid-twentieth-century United States: the competing claims of the elite versus the popular, the demands of market capitalism versus conceptions of quality, and the individual versus a homogenized society.<P>Gumshoe America traces the way those problems surfaced in hard-boiled crime fiction from the 1920s through the 1960s. Beginning by using a forum on the Ku Klux Klan in the pulp magazine Black Mask to describe both the economic and political culture of pulp fiction in the early twenties, McCann locates the origins of the hard-boiled crime story in the genre's conflict with the racist antiliberalism prominent at the time. Turning his focus to Dashiell Hammett's career, McCann shows how Hammett's writings in the late 1920s and early 1930s moved detective fiction away from its founding fables of social compact to the cultural alienation triggered by a burgeoning administrative state. He then examines how Raymond Chandler's fiction, unlike Hammett's, idealized sentimental fraternity, echoing the communitarian appeals of the late New Deal. Two of the first crime writers to publish original fiction in paperback — Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford — are examined next injuxtaposition to the popularity enjoyed by their contemporaries Mickey Spillane and Ross Macdonald. The stories of the former two, claims McCann, portray the decline of the New Deal and the emergence of the rights-based liberalism of the postwar years and reveal new attitudes toward

"If there is any segment of popular culture that mirrors economic, social, and political reality, it is surely detective fiction. Somehow dealing with crime forces authors to deal with the question of what holds society together even as they spotlight what threatens to tear it apart. Taking up such masters of the genre as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Sean McCann does an excellent job of showing how American detective fiction has reflected many of the central dilemmas of democracy in the 20th century. His chapter 'Dashiell Hammett and the Realist Critique of Liberalism' is one of the highlights of the book and makes a convincing case for seeing works such as The Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest, and The Glass Key as rooted in the historical moment of the 1920"s and 30"s. For fans of detective fiction, this book offers a way of soothing their consciences about their guilty pleasure—the cheap novels they have been reading on the sly all these years turn out to have something to teach us about American history. And those interested in American history will find that McCann has offered a new angle on understanding one of its most troubled and complex periods." Reviewed by Andrew Witmer, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)

"McCann brilliantly shows how depictions of detectives and deadbeats were at one and the same time struggles over the terms of New Deal liberalism/postwar Keynesianism and inquiries into the cultural office of popular narrative. "Gumshoe America" ought to earn McCann a visible and enduring place as a premier scholar of popular American writing and an exponent of original ideas about literary value, U.S. cultural politics, and the ruses of representation in a variety of American cultural locations."--Eric Lott, author of "Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class"

"The secret history of American crime fiction doubles back to the 1920s and 1930s American left. The noir novelists of Sean McCann's shrewd and disturbing "Gumshoe America "devised a fierce, experimental pop-Modernism, an intransigent anti-popular strain within popular culture. McCann writes passionately, argumentatively, authoritatively, alert to both accomplishment and loss. Probably no prior study of American crime fiction is more entangled in the claims and contradictions of community, race, class, and politics."--Robert Polito, author of "Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson "