Hard-Boiled Detectives

Introduction

“Hard-boiled” is an ambiguous term in detective and mystery fiction. From a historical perspective, it indicates the school of mystery writing spawned in the United States after World War I, partly in reaction to the English, or classical, form of the mystery genre, and partly in keeping with the literary movements of the era. In a purely descriptive sense, hard-boiled describes the terse style of writing and violent plots identified with the postwar school of detective literature, a style still often used in stories of the mystery genre. Some of the very best and some of the very worst mysteries and detective tales ever written have been works of hard-boiled fiction. To understand how that style of writing was developed, it is necessary briefly to consider the genre’s origins.

Birth of the Detective and the Cozy Mystery

As many critics have noted, the modern detective story has numerous antecedents. However, its most essential origins are in a trio of stories written by the American author Edgar Allan Poe during the 1840’s. Poe introduced his genius detective C. Auguste Dupin in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841); Dupin is not a police officer but a gentleman of some means and a scholar; he solves crimes because of his personal interest in the cases, as in “The Purloined Letter,” or because of his intellectual curiosity, as in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Some eighteen years after Poe introduced the trope of deductive reasoning, or “ ratiocination,” the English author Wilkie Collins published The Woman in White (1859); he later followed it with The Moonstone (1868). The latter novel, in its portrayal of a large gathering of well-to-do suspects and two police detectives who would come to represent mainstays of the genre—the brilliant detective and the bumbling incompetent—introduces many of the elements that would form the English detective novel.

The popularization of detective stories can be traced to Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the genius detective Sherlock Holmes. Doyle introduced Holmes—and his narrator, Dr. Watson—in A Study in Scarlet (1887) and would go on to write three more brief novels and fifty-six short stories about them. Doyle’s Holmes and the patterns of his narratives owe a debt to Poe’s Dupin stories: Both have genius detectives, less skillful narrators, and less-than-competent police forces. The English, or cozy, detective story became further formalized with the work of such twentieth century English writers as G. K. Chesterton, and his Father Brown stories; Agatha Christie and her Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple stories; and Dorothy L. Sayers, the creator of gentleman sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. American mystery writers such as S. S. Van Dine, the creator of gentlemanly dilettante detective Philo Vance, quickly embraced the cozy formula as well.

Each of these authors’ novels typically followed the conventions established earlier by Collins and Doyle. The crimes are almost always “whodunit” cases, and their detectives rarely deal with known criminals, who must be apprehended as opposed to discovered. Their detectives are rarely full-time policemen or members of various professional detective agencies (Poirot is a notable exception). Stories and plots are essentially conservative, unquestioning of the British class system, notions of right or wrong, or ways of life. Settings for the mysteries are typically pastoral, often on ancestral estates, and crimes are rarely perpetrated by commonplace career criminals for anything so base as passion or so prosaic as simple theft. The victims—and often the criminals—are members of the aristocracy. Violence is understated and usually does not occur on the pages of the stories. Stories are often solved in set-piece denouements, at which all the suspects are gathered by the detectives, who disqualify one suspect after the other, until the guilty parties are identified. These classical, detective stories are, in a sense, extensions of English novels of manners. Novels in the English, or classical, detective subgenre are often called “cozies.” However, scholars differ over whether this designation owes its origins to the mildness of the stories’ crimes and criminals or to the lace serving mats placed under tea services that so often appear in the novels.

By the time of Sayers’s and Van Dine’s heyday, during the middle to late 1920’s, the formula parameters of the cozy subgenre were strictly demarcated. The better cozy writers tended to subvert or toy with the formula, but scores of lesser writers were comfortable with the subgenre’s strictures. Hard-boiled detective writing arose partly in rebellion against the stolid and sturdy form of detective writing that was overwhelmingly popular during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

The hard-boiled reaction against the cozy formula might be attributed to the time when it arose as much as it is to any conscious decisions to break with the established formulas. Naturalism was the foremost literary trend in American fiction through the first two decades of the twentieth century. However, the term is misleading in that literary naturalism is not so much about the natural world as it is about using concepts familiar in the study of natural science, such as Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, to examine subjects in literary form. Part of Darwinism and natural science is examining the impact of the environment upon the subject; as a result, naturalist novels were often critiques of society and humankind’s social environments. For example, Stephen Crane’sMaggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) tells of a young “fallen woman” who is forced into a life of prostitution in New York. Frank Norris’s novel McTeague (1899) is about a working-class man who tries to overcome his social class and becomes a murderer. Similarly, many early hard-boiled novels were equally willing to critique the social milieu and challenge the social order.

The Western world was turned upside by World War I, which raged from 1914 to 1918. The war had many characteristics that distinguished it from earlier conflicts, such as its sheer scale, the huge numbers of combat fatalities, and the widespread postwar expectation that the war’s unsatisfactory settlement would lead to another big war within a generation or so—something that did, indeed, happen. In the aftermath of this traumatic event, many young writers found the safe and comfortable world portrayed by earlier authors to be alien and strange. Often grouped together, despite their great individual differences, as modernists, some writers, such as Irish novelist James Joyce and American poets Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, expressed their break with the old worlds stylistically. Eliot, however, also showed the disillusionment of the postwar generation in his famous poem The Waste Land, published in 1922. These themes of disillusionment and disenfranchisement also appeared in the novels of such American writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

The hard-boiled writers who gained prominence during the 1920’s were of this same generation of postwar writers who were so famously dubbed the Lost Generation by the American writer Gertrude Stein. Within the United States, the postwar period also saw enactment of the Volstead Act in 1920, which outlawed the sale of alcohol across the nation. The resulting Prohibition era soon created a nation of speakeasy saloons and amateur bootleggers. The large profits to be made from selling illegal alcohol during Prohibition fostered the development of organized crime and made possible ruthless gangsters such as Al Capone. Hard-boiled detective writers were attempting to accurately reflect the world they perceived around them.

Black Mask and Other Pulps

Mystery fiction was an important part of pulp magazine publishing, so named for the cheap and pulpy quality of the paper used in the magazines. One of the more important turn-of-the-twentieth-century pulps, The Strand Magazine, which was printed in England from 1891 to 1950, published many of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, as well as later works by Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie. The pulps were also home to other genres, such as romance, Westerns, men’s adventure stories, and horror and gothic fiction, all of which flourished in both the pre- and post-World War I eras.

One of the most important pulp magazines in the history of the detective genre, Black Mask was founded in 1920 by the famous columnist H. L. Mencken and editor George Jean Nathan to help finance their struggling arts and lifestyle magazine, Smart Set (1900-1930). After only eight months, they sold Black Mask at a profit. Initially, Black Mask published cozies, as well as romances, Westerns, and adventure stories. However, editor George W. Sutton, Jr., decided upon changing the magazine’s direction by emphasizing hard-boiled stories. After he left the magazine in 1924, his successors Phil Cody (1924-1926) and, most famously, Joseph T. “Cap” Shaw (1926-1936) continued to develop the distinctive hard-boiled flavor of Black Mask. Shaw was particularly important to both the longstanding success and reputation of the magazine and the development of the hard-boiled subgenre. He stressed that stories should be both plausible and realistic, that violence should serve a purpose in the narrative and not be simply gratuitous, and that writing should be clear and terse. Moreover, he thought that stories about crimes motivated by human nature were more entertaining than “whodunits” or complicated puzzles.

The birth of hard-boiled detective literature might fairly be traced to Black Mask, and more specifically to its December, 1922, issue. That issue contained Carroll John Daly’s first story, “The False Burton Combs,” and the first crime story of Dashiell Hammett (writing as Peter Collinson) “The Road Home.” In June, 1923, Daly introduced his two-fisted detective Race Williams in “Knights of the Open Palm.” In October of that same year, Black Mask published “Arson Plus” by Hammett (still writing as Collinson), who introduced the character he would later write about most often: the Continental Op.

Carroll John Daly

Although Dashiell Hammett is generally acknowledged as the founder of hard-boiled detective literature, the contributions of Carroll John Daly should not be underestimated. Daly’s stories were probably less influenced by broad literary trends than those of Hammett. Although Daly’s writing contrasted starkly with the cozy mysteries written by Doyle, Van Dine, Chesterton, and Christie in many ways, this is at least in part because his work stemmed from a different literary tradition. Daly’s detective Race Williams owes much more of his persona and methods to the pulp adventure and Western heroes that preceded him than he does to earlier detectives such as Sherlock Holmes. Williams rarely solves a crime through deductive reasoning. Instead, he typically takes up his pistols and simply goes after the most likely suspects. Unlike Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey and Van Dine’s Philo Vance, Williams is a professional private investigator who is paid for his investigations. At the same time, at least part of his motivation stems from the adrenalin thrills he gains from hunting criminals. Boastful and supremely confident, Williams has no compunction about gunning down adversaries. Much of the harsh violence associated with hard-boiled detective writing has its origins in Daly’s stories, even if his depictions are not always as realistic as would eventually be true of the form. Like his Western and adventure hero progenitors, Daly’s Williams is typically protective toward women; his ire greatly raised when they are endangered.

Daly was not the same caliber of writer as Hammett and Chandler. Dialogue in his stories often falls flat, and his characters have a tendency to present their expositions clumsily and often. Nevertheless, his stories are fast paced and packed with action. Sales of Black Mask magazine rose whenever he published in its pages, and his novels sold extremely well during the 1920’s and 1930’s. Daly published more than thirty stories in Black Mask, and more than twenty in Dime Detective, which was published from 1932 until 1953. He also serialized six Race Williams novels and eventually published seventeen books. In Williams’s immense capability and autonomous nature, later super-competent and violent hard-boiled detectives such as Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and Robert B. Parker’s Spenser find their origin.

Dashiell Hammett

More than any other writer, Samuel Dashiell Hammett may be said to have originated the hard-boiled form. A World War I veteran (and later a World War II vet), Hammett actually worked for the Pinkerton Detective Agency for two years before World War I and for a year afterward. Forced into convalescence by tuberculosis, he turned to writing to earn some income. After selling a few humorous pieces and literary stories, he turned to detective fiction. Although he initially wrote under pseudonyms, he soon began using his real name, dropping the Samuel.

The character who appeared most frequently in Hammett’s stories is his unnamed Continental Op, an operative for the Continental Detective Agency. Based loosely on a superior whom Hammett had known in the Pinkerton Detective Agency, the Op differs greatly from the such gentlemen sleuths as Lord Peter Wimsey and S. S. Philo Vance. Short, balding, and overweight, he uses street slang and is comfortable with the criminal language and is decidedly working-class. Although not afraid of violence, he prefers to avoid it; his goal is always to do his job, not to gain revenge, win the girl, or even necessarily see justice done. Above all, he is a professional. His very namelessness is, in a way, indicative of his professionalism, as his personal life never intrudes into his stories. He uses deductive reasoning but rarely solves crimes with his deductive prowess alone. Rather, he depends on careful methodology, interrogation techniques, infiltration of his opponents’ organizations, persistence, and when in need, carefully orchestrated chaos to achieve his ends. Hammett published some thirty-six stories about the Op, almost all in Black Mask magazine. He also published his five novels in serial form in Black Mask; his first two novels, Red Harvest (1927-1928) and The Dain Curse (1928), were about the Continental Op.

In Hammett’s Continental Op stories, readers find a definitive break with the cozy formula. Most of the criminals in these stories are practicing members of the underworld, not slumming members of the aristocracy. They commit crimes for money or passion and rarely for more obscure reasons. Identifying culprits is often less complicated than actually apprehending them. Many of Hammett’s stories and novels dwell in moral ambiguity. Furthermore, Hammett sympathized with leftist causes and often inserted implicit criticisms of corrupt capitalistic society in his writings.

Hammett’s third novel, one of the most famous detective novels ever published, The Maltese Falcon, was serialized in Black Mask in 1929 and was published in hardback by Alfred A. Knopf in 1930. Sam Spade, Hammett’s detective in that story, is morally evasive, a wise-cracker, and tough. In many ways, he is the quintessential private eye. The book has been filmed three times; the third and most important film, John Huston’sThe Maltese Falcon (1941), starring Humphrey Bogart as Spade, helped begin the film noir movement and established for many viewers the archetype of hard-boiled private investigators. Like the Op, Spade adheres to a code of conduct, as detectives are defined by their ability to live up to their own codes.

Some critics have pointed out that a number of Hammett’s plots are as unrealistic as those of the earlier cozy stories. For example, within his stories, characters are killed by knives thrown from great distances; leaders of cults try to commit human sacrifice; criminal gangs plot against, and kill, one another over a legendary jewel-encrusted statuette; and a large gang assaults an entire seaside town. However, it is not Hammett’s plots that set him apart from other writers, nor his more realistic depictions of criminal behavior and dialogue. What distinguishes from both cozy detective writers and the boisterous boastfulness of writers such as Carroll John Daly is his style. Hammett’s lines are sparse, terse, and understated; his prose style similar to that of Ernest Hemingway, who began publishing during the same year as Hammett. Readers are rarely privy to the thoughts inside his characters’ heads, even when Hammett writes in the third person, as he does in The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key (1931). As Joseph T. Shaw worked to formalize the conventions of what he thought hard-boiled detective literature should be in Black Mask magazine, he held up Hammett’s prose as a guide to style.

Raymond Chandler

In Raymond Chandler Shaw found the next great writer for Black Mask. Raised partly in England, a veteran of World War I, and classically educated, Chandler turned to writing after failing to succeed as an executive for an oil company. Less prolific than most of his contemporaries, he did not publish his first short story, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot,” until 1933, when he was forty-five. While publishing nineteen stories over the next six years, Chandler made use of a number of private eye characters such as Ted Carmady, John Dalmas, and Mallory. He would rework some of these narratives into his seven novels, and more important, rework these early private eyes into the character who—along with Hammett’s Spade—contributed most to the archetype of the hard-boiled private eye: Philip Marlowe.

Debuting in 1939’s The Big Sleep, Marlowe is simultaneously a more cynical and a more romantic narrator than Hammett’s Continental Op. For example, early in The Big Sleep Marlowe examines a picture of a questing knight in the parlor of a rich client’s home; in The Little Sister (1949) a woman client is named Quest; in Farewell My Lovely (1940), a woman client is named Grayle (or Grail). The connections should be clear to readers: Marlowe is the newest incarnation of the questing knight, challenged by the modern dragons of well-connected gangsters and entitled millionaires in a corrupt urban world.

Although Chandler’s plots are, at times, famously convoluted, the interactions among characters are realistic. After shooting a pair of villains in the first novel, Marlowe never kills anyone else in his remaining six novels (however, he does resort to violence in the four short stories about him published separately from the novels). Although in some ways Chandler’s method is influenced by Hammett’s, he develops what is often considered the most literary prose style in all of detective literature. Understated at times, humorous, cynical, incisive, poetic in its restrained descriptiveness, Chandler elevates the hard-boiled form to the level of literary art.

Like Hammett’s Op and Sam Spade, Marlowe is not particularly brilliant, though obviously gifted. His experience and insights into human failings often help to inform his detective work. Moreover, like the Op, he is single-minded and tough when it comes to pursuing his cases. He is also governed by an internal code, one even more exacting than those ruling Hammett’s characters. Despite his cynical shell, at heart he is determined to see truth and justice win out. In the same way that Hammett often used urban San Francisco for his settings, all the Marlowe novels are set in greater Los Angeles.

Characteristics of the Hard-Boiled Style

From the writings of Daly, Hammett, Chandler, and other pulp writers of the 1920’s and 1930’s, it is possible to tease out the basic characteristics of the original hard-boiled detective story. Other writers whose works contribute to this analysis include Raoul Whitfield, Frederick Nebel, Jonathan Latimer, and Brett Halliday.

Stories by these writers are almost always set within large urban environments that are run by corrupt institutions (Hammett’s Red Harvest is a notable exception). Their protagonists are always highly individualistic and often lone operators, such as Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. Even when the heroes are members of organizations, they typically do their work in idiosyncratic and autonomous ways, In the tradition of Hammett and Chandler’s detectives, later hard-boiled protagonists are typically laconic, understated, and unflappable wisecrackers. Their prime virtues are not preternatural powers of deduction and reasoning but single-minded persistence and the toughness to withstand the stress and violence that may beset them in pursuit of their cases. Often, the cases they initially undertake to investigate turn out to be something like red herrings; in pursuit of the truth, they must dig deeper than their clients may wish them to go, sometimes at great cost to the detectives themselves.

Violence always plays an important part in hard-boiled narratives. Not only are murders portrayed more gruesomely, more realistically, and more intimately than in cozy mysteries, but the detectives themselves are often violent persons. Some hard-boiled private eyes—notably Daly’s Race Williams and Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer—relish their ability to visit violence upon adversaries. Others—notably the Continental Op—fear that too much violence may cause them to go “blood-simple” and become the same as the criminals they seek to combat.

Finally, narrative voice and style are important to hard-boiled tales. Often, but by no means always, the stories are narrated in a laconic first-person vocie. In the tradition of Hammett and Chandler, and following Joseph T. Shaw’s edicts, the style of these tales is often fast-paced, clipped, and understated. Dialogue is peppered with street slang and police and criminal jargon. Emphasis is rarely placed on the detectives’ personal lives and backgrounds but is instead focused on examining the clients, criminals, and misfits who venture into the detectives’ lives.

Women as Victims, Temptresses, and Femmes Fatales

As a number of critics and scholars have noted, early hard-boiled novels seem to be hyper-masculine in a number of ways, particularly in terms of their violence, masculine codes of honor, and almost masochistic trials of endurance and survival. More troubling are portrayals of women in these stories. Typically, women in such stories are depicted as victims in need of saviors—such as Merle Davis in Chandler’s The High Window (1942) and Gabrielle Dain Leggett in Hammett’s The Dain Curse—or as temptresses trying to lure detectives away from their quests— like Helen Grayle in Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely or Dinah Brand in Red Harvest.

Quite often, women clients, love interests, or temptresses are revealed to be the villains of the stories. The most famous, perhaps, is Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. When French film critics writing about film noir during the 1940’s noticed the repetition of the villainous woman motif in American crime and detective films of the period, they dubbed her the femme fatale, the deadly woman.

Film scholars have often argued that portrayals of femmes fatales are a direct result of masculine unease at the changing role of American women during World War II, when many women left their homes and entered the defense industry and other work areas while men were away at war. This argument ignores the fact that most novels behind films such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Big Sleep (1946), Murder, My Sweet (1944), and Double Indemnity (1944) predated World War II. However, the role of women in society began changing greatly during the years immediately following World War I, thanks to passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, granting women the right to vote, and the flapper movement of the 1920’s with its inclusion of middle-class women in historically male environments such as nightclubs and saloons.

Interestingly, some feminist critics have argued that although the casting of women in villainous roles in hard-boiled stories is negative, its use is nevertheless better than portraying women simply as victims and sexual objects. The latter are stereotypes that would persist within the genre, particularly in works such as Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels. A femme fatale is, if nothing else, an empowered woman.

Since the early 1970’s a number of women writers have distinguished themselves as the authors of hard-boiled detective novels. Most notably, Sara Paretsky introduced no-nonsense, tough-talking, and violent V. I. Warshawski in 1982’s Indemnity Only. Sue Grafton’s private eye Kinsey Millhone has narrated more than nineteen novels since first appearing in A Is for Alibi during the same year. Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone first appeared in 1977’s Edwin of the Iron Shoes.

Hard-Boiled Crime and Gangster Stories

The initial impetus of hard-boiled detective writing focused on private eyes to such an extent that in 1930 Black Mask’s editor Joseph T. Shaw felt it necessary to write an explanatory note to justify the magazine’s serialization of Hammett’s The Glass Key, in which gangster Ned Beaumont works as a kind of detective to further his boss’s designs. The intensive violence, understated prose, laconic narration, witty dialogue, and immediacy of hard-boiled fiction were all quickly taken up by most writers of crime fiction in general. For that matter, many writers saw no conflict in writing stories that used thieves and gangsters as their protagonists in stories that viewed the detectives, in a sense, from the other side of the tracks.

One of the most accomplished writers of crime novels during this period was James M. Cain. A newspaper journalist who also worked briefly as an editor for The New Yorker, Cain moved to Los Angeles and worked sporadically for the film industry. In 1933, he published The Postman Always Rings Twice, whose narrator, Frank Chambers, is not a detective by any stretch of the imagination, and does not even seem to be a professional criminal. However, while eating at a roadside diner, he meets the owner’s wife, Cora. Wishing to become involved with her, he slowly allows himself to be seduced, until she persuades him to kill her husband. Similarly, Cain’s Double Indemnity (1936) tells of insurance agent and investigator Walter Huff’s conspiring with seductress Phyllis Nirdlinger to kill her wealthy husband. A more capable protagonist than Frank Chambers, Huff is fully aware of the danger in which Phyllis is placing him throughout the narrative.

Stylistically, Cain’s novels are hard-boiled in every way. Their prose is lean, and economical; their dialogue is sharp and witty; their violence is immediate and realistic. In a typical Cain story, a femme fatale leads the protagonist astray. Cain also dwells in the world of moral ambiguity common to many hard-boiled detective stories. As the refiner of the hard-boiled crime novel—in contrast to the hard-boiled detective novel—Cain’s fiction would have tremendous impact upon later writers such as Jim Thompson, the author of The Killer Inside Me (1952) and After Dark, My Sweet (1955), and Patricia Highsmith, author of Strangers on a Train (1950) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955).

Crossover Novels: Cozy and Hard-Boiled

As soon as the hard-boiled detective story became a recognizable formula by the early 1930’s, a number of writers sought to have their literary cake and eat it by merging forms of the cozy mystery with the emerging tropes of the hard-boiled form. Chief among these writers are Erle Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout.

Although Gardner’s fictional attorney Perry Mason would become one of the most famous television characters ever created, in his initial incarnation in the 1933 novel The Case of the Velvet Claws and through Gardner’s next several novels, Gardner drew upon both cozy and hard-boiled formulas. Mason is an attorney, not a private detective, but he employs detective Paul Drake to help him. Mason has to be tough and tenacious, and is not above getting his hands dirty as the novels spiral into hard-boiled levels of violence. On the other hand, Mason’s clients are rarely actually criminals, and they are generally not guilty of anything. Moreover, at the ends of cases, the usual suspects are rounded up and the villains are delivered in classic cozy denouements. Later Mason novels show little of their partly hard-boiled origins.

Similarly, Rex Stout’s obese detective Nero Wolfe (first appearing in the 1934 novel Fer-de-Lance) is very much in the vein of Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes. He does most of his investigating without leaving his townhouse, he is supremely intelligent and knowledgeable about obscure trivia, and, as required in the cozy formula, he typically resolves cases by summoning handfuls of suspects and disqualifying them, one by one, until the true villains are revealed to the less perceptive police detectives. Rarely career criminals, Wolfe’s clients and suspects are usually members of high society who get into trouble when they face seemingly impossible problems. Despite the formulaic pattern of Stout’s narratives and plots, however, the stories themselves are narrated in a laconic, humorous first person by his able assistant Archie Goodwin. Goodwin is a direct descendant of Hammett’s Continental Op. Like the Op, Goodwin is willing to work around the law in order to satisfy the demands of his employer. Through Wolfe and Goodwin, Stout managed to carry off a balancing act between the two subgenres in more than thirty-three novels and some thirty-nine shorter works.

From Film Noir to Roman Noir

Noir, a French word for “dark” or “black,” was first used to categorize hard-boiled, black-and-white films by French film critic Nino Frank during the mid-1940’s. Although the term was originally applied to American films of the 1940’s, many concepts developed in noir criticism, such as the femme fatale, have become a part of the lexicon in discussions of hard-boiled writing. Similarly, bookstores and publishers frequently use “noir” as a synonym for hard-boiled, even when the texts in question have never been filmed or are widely divergent from the early works of hard-boiled detective literature. A number of academic scholars, such as William Marling, have taken to calling hard-boiled writing roman noir.

The form, style, writing, direction, and creation of the great works of film noir are outside the subject of hard-boiled detective fiction. Nevertheless, a brief examination of several landmark films in that genre shows how much the popularity of the hard-boiled subgenre has benefited from its often excellent translations to the screen. Examples of novels that have been made into excellent films noirs include Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, which was filmed by director John Huston in 1941, and The Glass Key, which director Stuart Heisler filmed in 1942. (The same novel was the basis of the somewhat altered Miller’s Crossing, made by the Coen Brothers in 1990.) Chandler’s The Big Sleep was filmed by Howard Hawks in 1946; Farewell My Lovely was filmed as Murder, My Sweet by Edward Dmytryk in 1944. Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice was filmed by Tay Garnet in 1946, Double Indemnity by Billy Wilder in 1944, and Mildred Pierce (1941) in 1945 by Michael Curtiz. Similarly excellent films have been adapted from novels by Ross Macdonald, Cornell Woolrich, and Patricia Highsmith.

Post-World War II Developments

Within a decade or so of its invention, hard-boiled writing was every bit as formulaic as the cozy mysteries against which it had rebelled. Nevertheless, a large number of hard-boiled writers have managed to distinguish themselves. During the 1940’s and 1950’s, two radically different writers entered the fray. Mickey Spillane who established his vengeful, pistol-packing detective Mike Hammer in such novels as I, the Jury (1947) and Vengeance Is Mine (1950), is much more a follower of Carroll John Daly than Raymond Chandler. Gone from his novels is the kind of social critique found in Hammett—although Spillane is not fond of the rich. Hammer is something like an all-American supermale. Through more than twenty years, Spillane’s novels were immensely popular.

In contrast, Ross Macdonald, a completely different kind of writer, created a lonely, divorced detective in Lew Archer, whose name he took from Spade’s murdered partner in The Maltese Falcon. Like Chandler’s Marlowe, Archer kills a man in the first of his twenty novels, The Moving Target (1949). He then does whatever he can to avoid violence in later novels. A high stylist like Chandler, Macdonald brings a humanity and compassion to his detective that would eventually have as much influence on later genre writers as Hammett and Chandler had had.

Another excellent stylist and surprising writer and one of the most original hard-boiled writers during the 1950’s was the African American novelist Chester Himes. Himes published a number of literary novels before turning to detective fiction with For Love of Imabelle in 1957. His work focuses on two black New York police detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, who often confront racism and intolerance. Their seven novels are collectively titled the Harlem Detective novels.

Occasionally confused with Ross Macdonald because of his surname, novelist John D. MacDonald created an iconoclastic private eye in his beer-swilling, boat-dwelling, athletic, and capable ladies’ man Travis McGee, who first appeared in The Deep Blue Good-by (1964). Much like the Hammer and Archer novels, the McGee novels tend to become repetitive in their later iterations. Nevertheless, McGee often manages both to subvert the genre and to pay homage to it simultaneously.

Two of the most important writers in crime fiction of the 1950’s and 1960’s were masters of the inverted story. The work of Jim Thompson contains all the immediacy, vitality, and violence of essential hard-boiled fiction, even as he uses serial killers and corrupt policemen as his protagonists in novels such as The Killer Inside Me (1952) and Pop 1280 (1964). Patricia Highsmith’s obsessive antihero Tom Ripley has become a cult hero. Her work is more densely literary than is common among hard-boiled writing, but her plots are as bloody and unsentimental as anything from the pen of Mickey Spillane.

The 1970’s and Beyond

During the 1940’s, readers may have suspected that hard-boiled literature would become too formulaic to last as a subgenre without becoming self-parodying. Certainly many writers have followed in the footsteps of earlier authors without managing to overcome the limitations of the form. However, the genre has grown and developed in ways that Black Mask editor Joseph T. Shaw might never have dreamed. For example, the wisecracking banter that is considered intrinsic to the genre reached a kind of apogee in the crime novels of Elmore Leonard, who moved from writing Westerns to crime novels with The Big Bounce in 1969. The 1970’s also saw the emergence of one of the most enduring hard-boiled detectives since the pulp era with the Robert B. Parker’s creation of Spenser. In this character, Parker has merged the wit and downtrodden gallantry of Chandler’s Marlowe with the capability and physical prowess of Race Williams and Mike Hammer.

The predisposition of hard-boiled detectives to live on the seamy side of life has particularly informed the novels of James Crumley, whose books about Milo Milodragovitch and C. W. Sughrue have contained alcohol and cocaine abuse as well as heightened violence. Influenced greatly by Chandler, Crumley’s detectives almost always seem to find themselves in conflict with corrupt members of the upper class. Similarly, the detectives and policemen in the novels of James Ellroy have much in common with the criminals that they apprehend. Ellroy’s work follows Hammett’s in its exploration of violence and moral ambiguity.

During the last decades of the twentieth century, hard-boiled literature began following a trend of reverse migration, infiltrating Great Britain, notably in books by writers such as Ian Rankin and Philip Kerr. Hard-boiled women private detectives have flourished since the 1970’s. In addition to authors already discussed, Janet Evanovich has written a number of novels about her smart-alecky bounty hunter Stephanie Plum, whom she introduced in One for the Money in 1994. Patricia Cornwell has written mysteries about her medical examiner, Kay Scarpetta, and Kathy Reichs has written novels based around the detective work of forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A number of African American hard-boiled writers have followed in the path of Chester Himes; one of the best, Walter Mosley, has established a popular and critically hailed series with private eye Easy Rawlins, whom he introduced in Devil in a Blue Dress in 1990. In addition to ten novels about Rawlings, Mosley has also written a number of other crime novels about Fearless Jones and Socrates Fortlow.

Although hard-boiled writing has typically focused on urban environments since its inception in the pages of Black Mask, a number of regional detective novels have gained popularity. One of the most widely regarded and popular of these is James Lee Burke, a literary writer who turned to crime fiction with The Neon Rain in 1987. Most of Burke’s hard-boiled novels have focused on the exploits of Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux. Burke combines a poetic narrative style, tinged with southern nuances, with the explosive action and violence of early pulp writing. Despite its filtering into various parts of the mystery landscape, hard-boiled detective writing remains a vital subgenre in the field. Writers such as Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, and Robert Crais continue to reinvigorate the form during the twenty-first century.

Bibliography

Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Press, 1976. Thorough discussion of genre formulas in popular fiction, including hard-boiled detective fiction.

Chandler, Raymond. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1988. Selection of Chandler’s short fiction that also includes “The Simple Art of Murder,” his essential 1944 essay on both the origins of hard-boiled fiction and his understanding of the role of the genre and the private eye.

Geherin, David. The American Private Eye: The Image in Fiction. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985. History of fictional private eyes with detailed discussions and analyses of their characters.

Hamilton, Cynthia S. Western and Hard-Boiled Fiction in America. London: MacMillan Press, 1987. Discusses at length the ways in which hard-boiled fiction has been influenced by the Westerns of dime novels and the pulp magazines.

Horsley, Lee. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Provides a history of classical and hard-boiled crime fiction and also details how crime fiction can work as societal critiques.

Marling, William. The American Roman Noir. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Thorough discussion of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler. Also considers the world in which they lived and possible influences on their work.

Moore, Lewis. Cracking the Hard-Boiled Detective: A Critical History from the 1920s to the Present. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Press, 2006. Thematically rather than chronologically organized, this study characterizes the genre through chapter-by-chapter analyses.

Place, Janey. “Women in Film Noir.” In Women in Film Noir, edited by E. Ann Kaplan. Rev. ed. London: British Film Institute, 1980. Examination of the role of victims and femmes fatales in both films noirs and the novels on which they were based.

Smith, Erin A. “’Both a Woman and a Complete Professional’: Women Readers and Women’s Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction.” In Reading Sites: Social Difference and Reader Response, edited by Patrocino P. Schweickart and Elizabeth A. Flynn. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2004. Consideration of gender politics in women’s hard-boiled fiction and an analysis of the novels’ popularity.