Hardboiled
For the Frank Miller and Geof Darrow comic book, see Hard Boiled (comic). For the film, see Hard Boiled.Hardboiled crime fiction refers to a literary style pioneered by
Dashiell Hammett in the late 1920s and refined by
Raymond Chandler beginning in the late 1930s. Hardboiled fiction, most commonly associated with
detective stories, is distinguished by an unsentimental portrayal of
crime,
violence, and
sex. In the United States, the original hardboiled style has been emulated by innumerable writers, notably including
Chester Himes,
Mickey Spillane,
Ross Macdonald,
John D. MacDonald,
Robert B. Parker,
Sara Paretsky,
Sue Grafton, and
Walter Mosley.
The name comes from a colloquial phrase of understatement. For an egg, to be hardboiled is to be comparatively
tough. The hardboiled detective epitomized by Hammet's
Sam Spade and Chandler's
Philip Marlowe not only solves mysteries, like his "softer" counterparts, he (and often these days, she) confronts danger and engages in violence on a regular basis. The hardboiled detective also has a characteristically tough attitudeâ€"in fact, Spade and Marlowe are two of the primary fictional models for the attitude that has come to be known as "attitude": cool, cocky, flippant. For extensive detail on the identifying marks of the style, see the
history of American hardboiled fiction.
Noir fiction is the name sometimes given to a mode of crime fiction regarded as a subset of the hardboiled style. According to noir aficionado George Tuttle, "In this sub-genre, the protagonist is usually not a detective, but instead either a victim, a suspect, or a perpetrator. He is someone tied directly to the crime, not an outsider called to solve or fix the situation. Other common characteristics...are the emphasis on sexual relationships and the use of sex to advance the plot and the self-destructive qualities of the lead characters. This type of fiction also has the lean, direct writing style and the gritty realism commonly associated with hardboiled fiction."
> The seminal American writer in the noir fiction mode was
James M. Cainâ€"regarded as the third major figure of the early hardboiled scene, he debuted as a crime novelist in 1934, right between Hammett and Chandler. Other important U.S. writers in the noir tradition are
Cornell Woolrich,
Dorothy B. Hughes,
Jim Thompson,
David Goodis,
Charles Williams, and
Elmore Leonard. The term "noir fiction" may evoke unrelenting gloom; in fact, while the work of all the major authors in the field might be characterized by a
fatalistic attitude, it has been expressed in a variety of tones. Woolrich and Goodis indeed often portray what seems to be a sunless world, but Williams and Leonard are frequently bright. Hughes is somewhere in the middleâ€"serious, but with a lot of hardboiled "attitude." As for Cain and Thompson, each wrote some of the blackest of American genre fiction, and some of the funniest.
The popular use of "noir" in the term "noir fiction" derives immediately from "
film noir" as it has been used to characterize certain putatively "dark" Hollywood crime dramas and melodramas, many early examples of which were based on works by the original hardboiled writers. In turn, "noir" (French for "black"), first applied to American films in the mid-1940s by observers in France, was used there in similar senses. Most relevantly, the term
roman noir ("black novel") was employed to describe a range of books, some that an English speaker might think of as mysteries, others as gothic melodramas. Note that while the meanings of "noir fiction" and
roman noir are closely related, the derivation is not direct. Making the connection even tighter, in 1945 the French publisher Gallimard brought out a new series of paperback thrillers, many of them translations of hardboiled American fiction. The line was called
Série noire.W. R. Burnett, part of the first wave of hardboiled writers along with Hammett and Cain, wrote in a style that split the difference, often featuring heroic gangsters as his leads. The work of
Charles Willeford has sometimes been referred to as hardboiled or, particularly, noir fiction, though it is perhaps more helpfully characterized as "
neo-noir," as Willeford's crime writing rarely employs the conventions of hardboiled literature without critiquing them. Of latter-day hardboiled novelists who regularly feature detective protagonists, the most prominent to write in an unmistakably noir style is
James Ellroy.
*
Black Lizard*
Black Mask*
Gold Medal Books*
Hard Case Crime*
pulp magazine*
Most Honored Hammett Award Winners*
Mystery Time Line: Hard-Boiled MysteriesHardboiled and noir fiction online
*
"The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds" hardboiled
pastiche by
Neil Gaiman 
