This book takes a new approach to the American-ness of hard-boiled fiction and reprises the award-winning website detnovel.com. There are several new essays and author portraits, adding to the encyclopedic overview of the dark side of American detective fiction and film from the 1820s to today. No boy detectives or inquiring spinsters here, but if you like Dashiell Hammett, or the film Memento, or the writers Big Jim Thompson and James Ellroy, this is a book you need. This is American tough and noir. Scholar William Marling explains the roots of this side of the detective genre in the public fascination / fear of actual crime, then he traces the internalization of that dread more recently in "memory noir."