This fiction has various names: ‘private eye fiction’, ‘hardboiled fiction’ which is a way of describing its style, and erm I have been interested in this for some time, partly trying to assess the reasons why such fiction occurred in America as a complete breakaway from the old kind of detective fiction which we all know about, the country house murder, why erm the figure of the private detective becomes so important in this kind of fiction between the wars, and what the relationship of this sort of fiction is to not merely other kinds of American fiction during that period but to more abiding American themes, particularly erm themes of individualism and toughness.