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: The Freudian Desires of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and Their Detectives," 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
• 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."

• Location campus Central Library
• Audience:
• Categories:
  • Author Talk