"With an eye toward the origins and development of the hard-boiled story, LeRoy Lad Panek comments both on the way it has changed over the past three decades an

The hard-boiled private detective is among the most recognizable characters in popular fiction since the 1920s--a tough product of a violent world, in which pol

The hard-bitten PI with a bottle of bourbon in his desk drawer--it's an image as old as the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction itself. Alcohol has long been

Commentators have noted the extraordinary impact of popular culture on legal practice, courtroom proceedings, police departments, and government as a whole, and

Few conventions were left unchallenged in the 1970s as Americans witnessed a decade of sweeping social, cultural, economic, and political upheavals. The fresh a