At last, a cultural history of the hard-boiled crime genre from its origins to the present-one that recovers the fascinating link between tough guys and sensitive women. The testosterone-saturated heroes of American crime fiction owe a debt to the women of the nineteenth-century sentimental novel. Ranging from classics like The Big Sleep and The Talented Mr. Ripley to neglected paperback gems, Leonard Cassuto chronicles the dialogue-centered on the power of sympathy-between self-consciously masculine American crime stories and American literature's most female genre. Cassuto moves smoothly from Sam Spade to Hannibal Lecter against the backdrop of the sweeping social changes of the twentieth century, and ends with a startling link between today's serial killer stories and the domestic fictions of long ago.