Dewey, Thomas B.

After Dashiell Hammett’s and Raymond Chandler’s breakthrough, interest grew for so-called hard-boiled crime fiction in the USA. A number of authors, including (John) Ross Macdonald, were successful in the genre in the 1940s and 1950s, and among the most interesting one can name Thomas B. (Blanchard) Dewey. He only wrote a couple of bestsellers, but has been praised not least by colleagues. Bill Pronzini has described him as "one of the most underrated authors in detective fiction", and in 1993 the discriminating critic John L. Breen maintained that Dewey’s novel The Mean Streets (1955) is one of the 25 best hard-boiled detective stories that has been written.