One cannot emphasize enough the extent to which, with the 1940s and early 1950s rise in the paperback market, public fears focused around perceived dangers in pulp novels, and in the idea of mass readership in general. As discussed in chapter one, in 1952 and 1953 Senator Joseph McCarthy and the U.S. Congress conducted extensive and repressive investigations into the content of paperback novels, of which hardboiled fiction comprised the largest part. The House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials determined that, 'some of the most offensive infractions of the moral code were found to be contained in low-cost, paper-bound publications known as "pocket-size books" [which have] degenerated into media for the dissemination of artful appeals to sensuality, immorality, filth, perversion, and degeneracy.' This outcry reached a particular intensity in the Cold War era, as it coincided with the rapid growth of the paperback market, thereby swelling the readership and, presumably, increasing the threat of contamination such texts were believed to embody. Further, the fear and desire of the Other that drives the hardboiled novel coalesces in the 1950s with the large-scale Cold War containment anxiety over threats to--and within--American Borders (see chapter one). In a 'containment culture,' to borrow Alan Nadel's term, what was once the threat of immorality becomes a larger, national threat against the era's dominant conception of the American way of life.
Megan E. Abbott, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir, 76