TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations CHAPTER 1. Nobrow: Contents and Discontents The Most Ossified Popular Genre of All--Of the Standard of Taste--Flogging a Dead Horse--Damned If You Do and Damned If You Don't--Heads I Win, Tails You Lose--Vice and Its Victim--Beachbooks for Intellectuals--Sex, Money, and Revenge CHAPTER 2. Briefcases for Hire: Dashiell Hammett and John Grisham The Pauper and the Prince--The Toast of Hollywood--Waldron Honeywell--Who Framed Roger Rabbit?--Pow, You Are There-- Seven Thousand Liquor Cases--Vacant Niche in the Market--The Banzhaf Bandits--Worst of Pages--Exhibit A-- One Part Hammett, Two Parts Grisham CHAPTER 3. Boilerplate Potboilers: William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway Good God, I Can't Publish This--Guts and Genitals--Southern Gothic--Murder Capital of the United States--Sanctuary Much--Worse than Dresden--Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?--.38 Police Special--The Great American Paradox CHAPTER 4. The Not So Simple Art of Murder: Raymond Chandler No Chinaman Must Figure in the Story--Mayhem Spiced with Nymphomania--A Bombshell Redhead on the Run--The Is to Was Man--Pirandello Minus the Obtrusiveness--At Odds with the Canon--Wise Man, Wink, Wink--A Whodunit Without a Dunit--The Great Wrong Place--Anytown, USA--I Cannot Work or Sleep Till I Have Finished It CHAPTER 5. The Urban Procedural: Ed McBain Big Lights, Big City--Salvatore Albert Lombino--Graphic and Photographic--The Worst in Christendom--Colonel Mustard and Lady Buxom--M*E*T*R*O*P*O*L*I*S*--Nothing but a Woman--Mischief--The N Word--Behind the Thin Blue Line--Crime and the City CHAPTER 6. Take Two: Nelson DeMille and F.

Scott Fitzgerald Eppolito and Caracappa--Jack Cannon--Trouble Brews in Happy Valley--All Its Watches Limp--Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia--The Most Dangerous Country in the World--Take Two--We Keep You Clean in Muscatine--American Dream BIBLIOGRAPHY.