Everything about Hardboiled totally explained
Hardboiled crime fiction refers to a literary style 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. Hardboiled fiction, most commonly associated with
detective stories, is distinguished by an unsentimental portrayal of crime, violence, and sex. From its earliest days, hardboiled fiction was published in and closely associated with so-called
pulp magazines, most famously
Black Mask; 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. 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—originated by Daly's Terry Mack and Race Williams and epitomized by Hammett'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 attitude—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
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. Cain—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 Leonard is frequently bright, even when the color's blood red. Hughes and Williams are somewhere in the middle—her work is serious, yet with a lot of hardboiled "attitude," while his forte is the philosophical smile and shrug. 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 isn't 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.
Major variants of hardboiled and noir
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 five novels featuring dipso detective Bill Crane written by
Jonathan Latimer over the course of the 1930s constitute the first literary series of hardboiled
screwball comedy. The work of
Charles Willeford has sometimes been referred to as hardboiled or, particularly, noir fiction, though it's 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 mode is
James Ellroy. In terms of character, plot, and worldview,
Patricia Highsmith is a quintessential writer of noir fiction—indeed, her work has been the source for numerous movies, both American and European, regarded as film noirs—but her style sets her apart: far from "lean" and "direct," it's characteristically dense and subtle.
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