Hardboiled

From ArticleWorld

Hardboiled refers to a classic American sub-genre of the crime or detective novel. The protagonists of 'hardboiled' novels are tough, much like a hard-boiled egg, and often embrace the seamy side of life.

Unlike the refined European aristocrat-detective, Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade and his successors, including Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe and John D. McDonald's Travis McGee, are hard-living, cynical and clear-eyed. Violence and sex, disillusionment and ennui are part of their daily lives.

Their dialogue is chiselled and rich in images and metaphors, and they seem to hide their real selves behind witty or deadpan badinage and a haze of cigarette smoke. Although hardboiled detectives can be touched by a woman, in general their relationships are characterized by a game of flirting through giving offense and the certainty that when the case is over, so is the fling. Many writers of hardboiled wrote paperback and magazine 'pulp' fiction, but turned a lowbrow genre into one known for its distinctive style, with the unsentimental, spare realism and hard-hitting dialogue.

Noir is sometimes used interchangeably with hardboiled, though purists such as essayist George Tuttle notes that the focus in noir is away from the solvers of the crime and their lobby manager and newspaper friends. Instead, here the protagonist is the victim or close to the victim. James M Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me are darker than the hardboileds, and laugh at the world less than they portray the evil in it with chilling psychological acumen.

Film noir is inspired by this fiction and includes highly regarded versions of novels by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M Cain. Billy Wilder amd Orson Welles are directors closely associated with the genre.

Classic hardboiled and noir texts include: The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Double Indemnity, and The Long Goodbye.