I, the Jury | Literary Precedents
The Mike Hammer novels come directly out of the traditions of the hard-boiled detective fiction of the 1920s and 1930s when writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were creating a new and vital American prose genre. From their beginnings in the pulps, especially The Black Mask, the writers worked to develop a writing style stripped of all its literary pretensions and to depict a world of crime, particularly murder, which dealt with actual criminals and avoided all of the excesses of the Sherlock Holmes's school of eccentric and mannered private investigators. The hard-boiled...
[The entire page is 433 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
Tell a friend about I, the Jury at eNotes.
