"For readers and movie audiences, criminal life has traditionally provided a means of escape into violent adventure, hairbreadth escape and last-minute surprise. This is true enough of the formula whodunit or thriller, but the novels and sotries of Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle , Graham Greene , Eric Ambler, Simenon, Raymond Chandler and a few others, and the films of Hitchcock, have often been acutely and disturbingly prophetic of the way we live now. [...] How the Dangerous Edge, that point of no return reached by the murderer , the outlaw and the spy, often seems to reflect their secret personalities is the parallel theme of this book"

Bibliogr. p. 271-[272]