Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories

by Leonard Cassuto

Leonard Cassuto's cultural history links the testosterone-saturated heroes of American crime stories to the sensitive women of the nineteenth-century sentimental novel. From classics like The Big Sleep and The Talented Mr. Ripley to neglected paperback gems, Cassuto chronicles the dialogue--centered on the power of sympathy--between these popular genres and the sweeping social changes of the twentieth century, ending with a surprising connection between today's serial killers and the domestic fictions of long ago.

Genres: Literary Criticism

344 pages, Hardcover

First published November 21, 2008

Reviews

[Williwaw · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating survey of American crime literature, which posits that both the hard-boiled detective novel and serial-killer novel have strong thematic links to the "sentimental" fiction of the 19th century and its outdated model of the middle-class family. Cassuto shows how the "tough guy" detective starts out tough and gritty in Hammet's Maltese Falcon, but gets progressively softer through the 1950's and 1960's (in particular, with John D. MacDonald's "homey" Travis McGee and Ross MacDonald's psychoanalytical Lew Archer). While the detectives get softer, the criminals become ever more monstrous and unsympathetic, until we get characters like Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs.

I was particularly struck by Cassuto's insight that Capote's "In Cold Blood" serves as a bridge between older fiction in which killers have motives such as greed or revenge, and newer fiction in which the killers become incomprehensible psychopaths who engage in killing for its own sake.

Cassuto's book has me looking forward to reading fiction by Chester Himes, Gil Brewer, and Day Keene, among others.

[Nathanael Booth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leonard Cassuto's remarkable book posits that the hard-boiled novel continues an obsession with the themes of domesticity and mutual feeling that characterized the 19th C sentimental novel. He argues that the hard-boiled hero is increasingly sentimentalized/domesticated, while the villain is increasingly pathologized in the figure of the serial killer. Cassuto's study is convincing and lays out a powerful counter-narrative to conventional readings of the hard-boiled story as fundamentally reactionary.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading and re-reading this book for a month now and think it is a quite important work, not just on crime fiction, but of literary criticism in general. At the beginning I was skeptical about the connection between hard-boiled crime fiction and sentimentality. No longer. Cassuto's argument is totally convincing, as is his linkage of the devolving domestic detective and the rise of serial killer as counterpoints to the same sentimentally idealized image of the American family.