The questions, discussion topics, and author biographies included in the following Reading Group Guides are designed to enhance your reading of these outstanding selections from the "hard-boiled" school of crime writing: The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson, The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler, and The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. We hope that they will provide you with new ways of looking at--and talking about--the nature of detective fiction, as well as give you insight into how the hard-boiled style of writing emerged in the genre; how the style was shaped by twentieth-century American culture and by the lives of the men who created it; and how this form of writing has subsequently affected the way we view ourselves as Americans.