This book fills a gap in both literary and feminist scholarship by offering the first major study of femme fatales in hardboiled crime fiction. Maysaa Jaber shows that the criminal literary figures in the genre open up powerful spaces for imagining female agency in direct opposition to the constraining forces of patriarchy and misogyny.

Introduction
1. The 'Mad-Bad' Criminal Woman
PART I: PRE-WAR CRIMINAL FEMMES FATALES
2. Narratives of the Underworld: Violence and Dangerous Femininity in Dashiell Hammett's Labyrinthine Criminal World
3. Narratives of Detection: Femme Fatality and the Detective 'Hero' in Raymond Chandler's Fiction
4. Narratives of Seduction: The Criminal Femme Fatale and the 'forbidden box' in James M. Cain
PART II: POST-WAR CRIMINAL FEMMES FATALES
5. Crime, Sex and Paranoia in Post-War Hardboiled Fiction
6. The Duality of David Goodis's Criminal Femmes Fatales
7. Mickey Spillane's Criminal Femmes Fatales and the Cold War Vendetta
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Maysaa Husam Jaber is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Baghdad, Iraq. She was a fellow in The University of Massachusetts Boston, USA from September to November 2013. She has published with Palgrave Macmillan, Cambridge Scholars Publishing and the Arab World English Journal.