The way out: some life-style sources of the literary tough guy and the proletarian hero / Kingsley Widmer -- Labels / Benjamin Appel -- The tough Hemingway and his hard-boiled children / Sheldon Norman Grebstein -- Focus on "To have and have not": to have not: tough luck / Philip Young -- The 'black mask" school / Philip Durham -- The poetics of the private-eye: the novels of Dashiell Hammett / Robert I. Edenbaum -- Focus on "The Maltese falcon": the metaphysical falcon / Irving Malin -- Man under sentence of death: the novels of James M. Cain / Joyce Carol Oates.