THE GIANTS OF HARD-BOILED FICTION
"THEN"
In the early 1920’s a new form of fiction was born in the pages of pulp magazines. It had action, but wasn’t adventure. It had mystery but not in the style of Sherlock Holmes, Lupin. And it’s heroes were detectives but rarely were they policemen. These heroes, in the vernacular of their time, were hard-boiled and they’re still with us today.
Let me tell you here and now that anything I write betrays my own viewpoint, and some of my opinions may be open to dispute. For example, some experts will tell you that Carroll John Daly wrote the first hard-boiled stories. I maintain that Dashiel Hammett invented the form. History does show that Daly’s private investigators appeared in Black Mask magazine a few months before Hammett’s, but his stories were much more the basic adventure stuff common to pulp magazines at the time. Sure, he had the smart mouth dialog and heroic nature, but his stories lacked the settings, the social friction, and the important focus on character that marks the genre today. It was Hammett who put those elements together and turned the whodunit into a new form of social commentary.
So as far as I’m concerned, the first hard-boiled detective was the Continental Op, whose first case appeared in the October 1923 issue of Black Mask. While the stories are told in the first person, this investigator working for the huge Continental detective agency knows the stories he’s telling aren’t about him but rather about the cases, and the victims. To symbolize this, he never mentions his name, throughout a huge number of tightly written short stores.
Hammett was a great short story writer, and he knew it. Maybe that’s why he only gave the world five full-length works, and there could even be debate there. If you look closely at Red Harvest (1927) and The Dain Curse (1928) you’ll see that they are each really short stories strung together. These were followed by The Maltese Falcon (1928), The Glass Key (1930) and The Thin Man (1934), all of which should be required reading for mystery buffs. To get a feel for the timelessness of Hammett’s prose, you have only to realize that Sam Spade appeared only in the novel that introduced him, The Maltese Falcon, and three later short stories, yet just try finding a person in the 21st century who hasn’t heard of him.
If Hammett invented the hard-boiled detective story, Raymond Chandler perfected it. Chandler never reached Hammett’s level of plotting ability, but his writing style was so beautiful that he set the standard for the characters and tone these stories must have. The example I always point to for terse, pointed hard-boiled dialog is taken from The Big Sleep (1939):
"Tall, aren’t you," she said.
"I didn’t mean to be."
I’ll take a stand right here and say that I believe The Big Sleep (1939) to be the best hard-boiled novel ever written, and I’d even say one of the best books written in the 20th century. Chandler mastered presentation of a cynical yet honorable, flawed yet respectable hero.
His short stories started appearing in 1933. Then Chandler gave us seven novels and the immortal Phillip Marlowe. The "must read," after The Big Sleep is Farewell, My Lovely (1940). You should also catch No Crime in the Mountains (1941) and The Lady in the Lake (1943).
Ross MacDonald picked up the writing baton in 1943 with his first novel, The Dark Tunnel (If you see a book entitled I Die Slowly, it’s the same novel.) Twenty-six books followed, although some of them are collections of previously published novels. His detective, Lew Archer, certainly meets all the hard-boiled criteria, while is plots approach Hammett, his prose is closer to Chandler’s beauty. Prior to writing his award winning novels, MacDonald was an English professor. His work is so smooth it is barely prose. In fact, the author himself has been quoted as saying that sections of his first two novels were actually written in loose blank verse. Read them, and you’ll see what he mean.
I will never defend Mickey Spillane as breathing the same rarefied air as the previous authors, there is no denying that his detective, Mike Hammer, has done a great deal to popularize the hard-boiled detective and keep the genre alive. The dozen novels spread over the decades between I, the Jury (1947) and Black Alley (1996) have sold more than 140 million copies. You should read a few just to know what most of the world thinks a hard-boiled novel is.
John D. MacDonald was the hard-boiled standard bearer during my youth. Starting with The Deep Blue Good-by (1964), he drags his hero, Travis McGee, through 21 color-coded adventures. Not all these stories are clue-laden mysteries like the ones Lew Archer faced, but McGee lives in the hard-boiled world, in the hard-boiled style. He’s as world weary as any of his brethren, although a bit more philosophical than most. He is in truth, Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe in the next generation.
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