ABSTRACT
Consequently, to evoke the characterization of the hero in crime fiction, which forms the epigraph of this chapter, Chandler's everyman as the sole, configurai subject of the crime form must be undercut. He is not everything: a consummate
construct a fascination with conflicted masculinity, which extensively privileges male experience and ultimately seeks to make the divisions of a period comprehensible and acceptable to an audience (1998, 29). I wish to concur that the thriller can offer a site for staging masculinities but also to add these are by no means stable and are defeated by the historical conditions, which they seek to naturalize. Furthermore, the form also stages femininities, as with the parallel couples in The Psalm Killer, and the parallel females in Gordon Stevens' Provo.
