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- 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 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, 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. 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.
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 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.
See also
External links
Hardboiled and noir fiction online
- "The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds" hardboiled pastiche by Neil Gaiman
Hardboiled detective | Roman noir | Noir | ハードボイルド | Hårdkokt
"Hardboiled"