Critical Essay | Critical Essay by David J. Geherin

Critical Essay by David J. Geherin

SOURCE: Geherin, David J. “The Hard-Boiled Detective Hero in the 1970s: Some New Candidates.” Armchair Detective 11, no. 1 (1978): 49-51.

In the following essay, Geherin presents a survey of detective fiction from the 1970s, finding writers Robert Parker Spenser, Roger Simon, and Andrew Bergman faithful to the hard-boiled tradition.

The hard-boiled detective hero has had a long and illustrious career in American detective fiction: Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and Lew Archer are the most famous examples of the type and, taken together, illustrate the gradual development of the hard-boiled private eye over the past fifty years. But Ross Macdonald has now had the stage pretty much to himself for the last two decades and a question arises—Is the hard-boiled detective novel written out, an anachronism in the 1970s, or are there young writers with skill enough to carry on the tradition and to invite favorable comparisons with Dashiell Hammett,...
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