It is difficult to talk about To Have and Have Not outside the context of hard-boiled fiction, that distinctly American literary form that emerged in the early years of the twentieth century reaching its apogee during the 1930s and 1940s. The interest in and production of crime fiction grew so fast that almost overnight the detective story became a separate category in the magazine industry, even getting its own heading in The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature as early as 1905. By the early 1930s, there had been a virtual explosion of hard-boiled fiction on news stands, as witnessed in the proliferation of pulp magazines such as Action Detective, Clues, and Black Mask. Although Hemingway professed to dislike the hard-boiled school of writing, he did acknowledge his admiration for Raymond Chandler, one of the most renowned practitioners of the hard-boiled detective genre. Published in 1937, To Have and...