Hardboiled (or hard-boiled) fiction is a literary genre that shares some of its characters and settings with crime fiction (especially detective fiction and noir fiction). The genre's typical protagonist is a detective who battles the violence of organized crime that flourished during Prohibition in the United States (1920–1933) and its aftermath, while dealing with a legal system that has become as corrupt as the organized crime itself.
Genre 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 James M. Cain and by
Raymond Chandler beginning in the late 1930s.
English writer Gerald Butler was referred to as the "
English James M. Cain", and his characters were noted as hardboiled.
Its heyday was in 1930s–50s America.
[.]
Pulp fiction
From its earliest days, hardboiled fiction was published in and closely associated with so-called
pulp magazines. 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.
[ "Extremely tough, unsentimental and lethal, Everhard foreshadowed the hard-boiled characters of the following decade". ] In its earliest uses in the late 1920s, "hardboiled" did not refer to a type of crime fiction; it meant the tough (cynical) attitude towards emotions triggered by violence.
The hardboiled crime story became a staple of several pulp magazines in the 1930s; most famously Black Mask under the editorship of Joseph T. Shaw,[ ][ A brief survey of the genre's early days, focusing on Black Mask.] Consequently, "pulp fiction" is often used as a synonym for hardboiled crime fiction or gangster fiction;[ Hardboiled/noir "family tree", by crime fiction author and scholar Megan Abbott.] In the United States, the original hardboiled style has been emulated by innumerable writers, including James Ellroy, Paul Cain, Sue Grafton, Chester Himes, Paul Levine, John D. MacDonald, Ross Macdonald, Walter Mosley, Sara Paretsky, Robert B. Parker, and Mickey Spillane. Later, many hardboiled novels were published by houses specializing in paperback originals, most notably Gold Medal, and in later decades republished by houses such as Black Lizard.
File:Paolo Monti - Servizio fotografico - BEIC 6340857.jpg|Photo by Paolo Monti, 1975
File:Spicy-Adventure Stories November 1936.png|Femme fatale were standard fare in hardboiled fiction.
Relation to noir fiction
Hardboiled writing is also associated with "
noir fiction".
Eddie Duggan discusses the similarities and differences between the two related forms in his 1999 article on pulp writer
Cornell Woolrich.
[ ] In his full-length study of
David Goodis, Jay Gertzman notes: "The best definition of hard boiled I know is that of critic Eddie Duggan. In noir, the primary focus is interior: psychic imbalance leading to self-hatred, aggression, sociopathy, or a compulsion to control those with whom one shares experiences. By contrast, hard boiled 'paints a backdrop of institutionalized social corruption.
See also
Further reading
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An essay on the form's early history.
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History of the genre.
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A chronology of significant hardboiled novels, compiled by critic Geoffrey O'Brien for the 1981 edition of his Hardboiled America.
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External links
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A list of hard-boiled and noir writers.
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Comprehensive bibliographies.
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Comprehensive bibliographies of many important hardboiled/noir authors.
