[audiobook] A Night Without Armor by Jewel in Arts-Photography

Description

Early in the twentieth century a new character type emerged in the crime novels of American writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler: the "hard-boiled" detective; most famously exemplified by Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Unlike the analytical detectives of nineteenth-century fiction; such as Edgar Allan Poes Inspector Dupin; the new detectives encountered cases not as intricate logical puzzles but as stark challenges of manhood. In the stories of these characters and their criminal opposites; John T. Irwin explores the tension within ideas of American masculinity between subordination and independence and; for the man who becomes "his own boss;" the conflict between professional codes and personal desires. He shows how; within different works of hard-boiled fiction; the professional either overcomes the personal or is overcome by it; ending in ruinous relationships or in solitary integrity; and how within the genre all notions of manly independence are ultimately revealed to be illusions subordinate to fate itself.