Beginning with Dashiell Hammett testifying before Senator Joseph McCarthy, Pulp Culture pursues the lives and work of crime writers who approached the genre at street level: David Goodis, Chester Himes, Jim Thompson, Dorothy B Hughes, Dolores Hitchens, Leigh Brackett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, Howard Browne, Gil Brewer, William B McGivern, Lionel White, Ross MacDonald, Horace McCoy, Charles Willeford and Charles Williams. Pulp Culture gives post-war crime fiction a political and irreverent reading, examining the politics of paranoia, private detection and criminality; the origins of crime fiction; the role of women in a male-dominated genre; and why the early 1960s marked the final days of classic hardboiled fiction. It also considers the genre's influence on contemporary crime writers and film-makers. Pulp Culture is essential reading for anyone interested in noir writing, films and the post-war era.