Hard-Boiled Anxiety: The Freudian Desires of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, and Their Detectives

For close to fifty years, three masters of the hard-boiled detective novel dispatched intrepid gumshoes into upper-crust homes and seedy back alleys, peeling back and exposing all the pretexts of polite society. Or did they? Were there even closer, darker secrets they never quite copped to? In Hard-Boiled Anxiety, Karen Huston Karydes offers a new and unsettling reading of the classic pairings: Dashiell Hammett and his successive shamuses, the Continental Op, Sam Spade, and Nick Charles; Raymond Chandler and his brooding knight errant, Philip Marlowe; and Ross Macdonald and his 1960s sleuth, Lew Archer. Each novelist, though celebrated in the American pantheon, harbored ghosts, injuries, and a guilty backstory of his own. Their fictional detectives served as doubles, in ways both flamboyant and subtle, as the authors wrestled inner demons and labored, in Karydes's words, to "write themselves well." Included are remarkable observations from a memoir kept by Ross Macdonald as he underwent psychotherapy in the 1950s, never divulged at this length until the publication of this volume. Sigmund Freud, welcome to Sunset Boulevard.

About the Author :
Karen Huston Karydes had a twenty-four-year career at the Arlington County, Virginia Department of Libraries, focusing on adult acquisitions and reference. She then ran the library for inmates inside the Arlington County Detention Center for five years. She has master's degrees in English from New York University and Library Science from the University of Maryland. At sixty, she pursued her interest in literary biography by entering the University of Maryland's Ph.D. program in English Language and Literature. After receiving her degree in 2010, she returned to full-time public library work and is now the Acquisitions Librarian for the Talbot County Free Library in Maryland. Her book, Hard-Boiled Anxiety: The Freudian Desires of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald and Their Detectives, is based on her dissertation

Review :
"Behind the gangsters, corrupt plutocrats, stoic gumshoes, and femmes fatales hovers Dr. Sigmund Freud, who masterminds the mayhem in classic private-eye stories, according to this study in Freudian lit-crit... A shrewd, illuminating, and entertaining exploration of the twisted roots of writerly creativity." --Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review) "Perusing her compassionate but unsparing accounts of these men's psychic case-histories is often as thrilling an experience as reading their legendary novels. The brilliant Hard-Boiled Anxiety should become a benchmark work in Hammett-Chandler-Macdonald studies." --Tom Nolan, author of "Ross Macdonald: A Biography"; editor of "Ross Macdonald's The Archer Files"; and co-editor (with Suzanne Marrs) of "Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald" "Curl up on the analyst's couch with all your favorite mystery scribes, as Karen Huston Karydes sleuths out the neurotic, personal threads that make up the warp and the weft of their greatest fictions. A dark, yet illuminating read." - Kim Cooper, author of "The Raymond Chandler Map of Los Angeles" and "The Kept Girl"