For close to fifty years, three masters of the hard-boiled detective novel dispatched intrepid gumshoes into upper-crust homes and seedy back alleys, peeling back and exposing all the pretexts of polite society. Or did they? Were there even closer, darker secrets they never quite copped to, or understood?
In Hard-Boiled Anxiety, Karen Huston Karydes offers a new and unsettling reading of the classic pairings of Dashiell Hammett and his successive shamuses, the Continental Op, Sam Spade, and Nick Charles; Raymond Chandler and his brooding knight errant, Philip Marlowe; and Ross Macdonald and his 1960s sleuth, Lew Archer.
The reading of Hard-Boiled Anxiety: The Freudian Desires of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and Their Detectives will be held Thursday, October 20, 2016 at 2:00 p.m. at the St. Michaels branch of the Talbot County Free Library.
Karen Huston Karydes had a twenty-four-year career at the Arlington County, Virginia Department of Libraries, focusing on adult acquisitions and reference. She then ran the library for inmates inside the Arlington County Detention Center for five years. At sixty, she pursued her interest in literary biography by entering the University of Maryland’s Ph.D. program in English Language and Literature. After receiving her degree in 2010, she returned to full-time public library work and is now the Acquisitions Librarian for the Talbot County Free Library in Maryland. For more information you can call (410) 745-5877 or visit the library website at www.tcfl.org.
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