Volume 52, Number 5 · March 24, 2005
The Conscientious Op
By Richard Eder
Little Scarlet
by Walter Mosley
Little, Brown, 306 pp., $24.95
Tough-talking, with the dregs of a virtuous heart curdled by the world's bleak crookedness, the hard-boiled private eye emerged in the 1920s in an obscure magazine, The Black Mask. At the end of the decade and on through the Thirties and Forties he came to glory with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and thereafter with an unending stream of successors, notably Ross Macdonald and, latterly and perhaps less notably, others who keep a cat or go in for gourmet cooking.
Review, 3975 words
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