Hardboiled

Hardboiled (or hard-boiled) fiction is a literary genre that shares to some degree its characters and settings with crime fiction (especially detective stories). Although deriving from romantic tradition which emphasized the emotions of apprehension, horror and terror, and awe, the hardboiled fiction deviates from the tradition in the detective's cynical attitude towards those emotions. The attitude is conveyed through the detective's self-talk describing to the reader (or, in film, to the viewer) what he is doing and feeling. The genre's typical protagonist was a detective, who daily witnesses the violence of organized crime that flourished during Prohibition, while dealing with a legal system that had become as corrupt as the organized crime itself. Rendered cynical by this cycle of violence, the detectives of hardboiled fiction are classic antiheroes.

Origin of the term

The term comes from a process of hardening one's egg; to be hardboiled is to be comparatively tough. The hardboiled detectiveâ€"originated by Carroll John Daly's Terry Mack and Race Williams and epitomized by Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler's Philip Marloweâ€"not only solves mysteries, like his "softer" counterparts, the protagonist confronts violence on a regular basis leading to the burnout and the cynical (so-called "tough") attitude towards one's own emotions.

The genre's pioneers

The style was pioneered by Carroll John Daly in the mid-1920s, popularized by Dashiell Hammett over the course of the decade, and refined by Raymond Chandler beginning in the late 1930s; its heyday was in 1930sâ€"50s America.

Pulp fiction

From its earliest days, hardboiled fiction was published in and closely associated with so-called pulp magazines, most famously Black Mask under the editorship of Joseph T. Shaw. In its earliest uses in the late 1920s, "hardboiled" didn't refer to a type of crime fiction; it meant the tough (cynical) attitude towards emotions triggered by violence.

Pulp historian Robert Sampson argues that Gordon Young's "Don Everhard" stories (which appeared in Adventure magazine from 1917 onwards), about an "extremely tough, unsentimental, and lethal" gun-toting urban gambler, anticipated the hardboiled detective stories.

Black Mask moved exclusively to publishing detective stories in 1933, and pulp's exclusive reference to crime fiction probably became fixed around that time, although it's impossible to pin down with precision. The hardboiled crime story became a staple of several pulp magazines in the 1930s; in addition to Black Mask, hardboiled crime fiction appeared in Dime Detective and Detective Fiction Weekly. Later, many hardboiled novels were published by houses specializing in paperback originals, also colloquially known as "pulps".

Consequently, "pulp fiction" is often used as a synonym for hardboiled crime fiction or gangster fiction; some would distinguish within it the private-eye story from the crime novel itself. In the United States, the original hardboiled style has been emulated by innumerable writers, including Sue Grafton, Chester Himes, Paul Levine, John D. MacDonald, Ross Macdonald, Jim Butcher, Walter Mosley, Sara Paretsky, Robert B. Parker, and Mickey Spillane.

Hardboiled writers around the world

• France - Léo Malet
• Germany - Jakob Arjouni
• Spain - Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
• Norway - Arthur Omre
• Japan - Kenzo Kitakata, Arimasa Osawa, Go Osaka
• United States - Chester Himes
• Wales - Malcolm Pryce
• Italy - Enrico Teodorani

See also

References

Further reading

• Breu, Christopher (July 2004). "Going blood-simple in poisonville: hard-boiled masculinity in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest". Men and Masculinities (Sage) 7 (1): 52â€"76. doi:10.1177/1097184X03257449. 
• Gosselin, Adrienne Johnson (2002). Multicultural Detective Fiction: Murder from the "Other" Side, Garland Publishing, ISBN 0-8153-3153-3
• Haut, Woody (1996). Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War, Serpent's Tail, ISBN 1-85242-319-6
• Irwin, John T. (2006). Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir, Johns Hopkins University Press, ISBN 0-8018-8435-7
• Kemp, Simon (2006). Defective Inspectors: Crime-fiction Pastiche in Late Twentieth-century, Maney Publishing, ISBN 1-904350-51-8
• Mizejewski, Linda (2004). Hardboiled and High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture, Routledge Chapman Hall, ISBN 0-415-96970-0
• O'Brien, Geoffrey (1997). Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir, Da Capo, ISBN 0-306-80773-4
• Panek, LeRoy Lad (2000). New Hard-Boiled Writers: 1970s-1990s, University of Wisconsin Press, ISBN 0-87972-819-1
• Server, Lee (2002). Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers, Facts On File Inc., ISBN 0-8160-4577-1

External links

• "Detective Novels: An Overview" major history of the genre by Prof. William Marling, Case Western Reserve University
• "The Hard-Boiled Way" article by Gary Lovisi; originally published in A Shot in the Dark, March 1995
• Mystery Time Line: Hard-Boiled Mysteries brief survey of the genre's early days, focusing on Black Mask; part of the MysteryNet website
• "American Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction, 1920s-1940s", an essay on the form's early history by Lee Horsley
• "1920-1945: The Interwar Period and the Development of Hard-boiled Crime Fiction", Lee Horsley
• "Hard-boiled Investigators", Lee Horsley
• Hardboiled Bibliographies comprehensive bibliographies of many important hardboiled/noir authors; part of the RARA-AVIS website
• The Hardboiled Era: A Checklist, 1929-1958 chronology of significant hardboiled novels, compiled by critic Geoffrey O'Brien for the 1981 edition of his Hardboiled America
• Toward a Hardboiled Genealogy hardboiled/noir "family tree", by crime fiction author and scholar Megan Abbott
• Twists, Slugs and Roscoes: A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang
• "Hard-boiled Detective" Comprehensive Bibliographies
• "Hard-boiled Guide", a list of hard-boiled and noir writers