What IS HARD-BOILED FICTION?

The world of mystery fiction is divided into several sub-genres and there is something for every taste.  At one end of the spectrum sits the tea cozy, usually featuring an older woman but always an amateur sleuth who Miss Marples her way through the mystery in genteel fashion.  At the other end we find the police procedural, in which the reader follows a case conducted the way the professionals do it.  And someplace in between and off to one side you will find hard-boiled detective fiction.

The genre is surely named for its heroes, the detectives who were originally called hard-boiled.  In those days (the 1920s) hard-boiled was a slang phrase which the World Book Dictionary defines as "tough, rough, not easily moved by feelings."  Synonyms listed include hardened, callous, hard-headed and shrewd.  It’s not hard to see how this term became attached to this group of detectives.

But there’s more to hard-boiled fiction than the detectives.  These men, and sometimes women today, live in a dark, gritty world.  It’s a place much like our world, but a part of it most of us don’t visit much.  A world where organized crime is a powerful force in an underworld subculture.  A world where violence is common, where corruption is everywhere, and where more people are hostile than friendly.  It takes a special kind of man to stride though all that muck and not get dirty.

There is also a social element to these tales.  Stories often revolve around the friction between upper crust society and the lower economic levels.  The honest crime of the streets meets the higher level corruption of the wealthy or political elite.  Many of the early writers illustrated this in San Francisco.  I try to work the same elements on the east coast, where Washington DC’s poor live side by side with Northern Virginia or Maryland’s upper classes.  The conflict is real, and it takes a special man to walk in both worlds without getting crushed between the two.

A third key factor in this genre of fiction is the action.  Rather than being flashy and exotic, the action here is usually slow and brutal, and he hero doesn’t just kick butts.  He has to be able to take a good beating too.  People sustain real injuries in realistic battles, and the reader is forced to really look at them.  Fans of these stories know what really happens when a bullet hits a man in the chest, or a fist smacks against someone’s jaw.  This isn’t cartoon violence.  This is the hard reality that there are consequences when a chair interrupts the natural path of a human head.

Hard-boiled stories almost always revolve around the characters.  After all, our hero isn’t a scientists, he’s a mug.  Forensic evidence is seldom the clincher in his cases.  He solves the mystery by talking to people, lots of them, and they’re all lying.  He moves doggedly on, gathering facts by the carload, hoping that eventually he’ll see a pattern or turn up a clue.  The reason is that everything hinges on the motivations and personalities of the cast.  For this type of writing to work, all the people in a story must be well rounded and fully developed.  They all have their flaws, and most have a spark of decency too.

But of course, the most important defining characteristic of hard-boiled detective fiction is the detective himself.  He knows there’s a job to do, and he’s the only one who can get it done.  He may be a tough guy, and all those things I described at the beginning of this article, but he knows what’s right and wrong.  He’s usually on a quest for the truth, or justice, or simply against the evil of the world.  He has a clearly defined moral code, at least clearly to him.  Sometimes he’ll steal a rich man’s watch, but never will he dishonor a lady or turn his back on a person in real trouble.  Rarely is he well-off financially, because in his world, being moral doesn’t pay very well.

Maybe the most important thing about the hard-boiled detective is hardest to define.  It’s his style.  It’s the way he stands as an island of peace when surrounded by vicious killers.  It’s his relaxed confidence, whether he’s talking to a Rockefeller or a Capone.  It’s the deadpan wit that’s so dry it crackles.

So when the dame says, "Tall, aren’t you?"  He doesn’t say "Yeah," or "So what?"  but rather... "I didn’t mean to be."  Phillip Marlowe said that in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and ever since I read that line I’ve prayed for some dame to say that to me.  And that’s what hard-boiled detective fiction is all about.  It’s about the guy who lives in a world as real as our own, but he’s doing it so much better you want to be him.  Even if it does mean taking a beating once in a while.

Check out the Giants of Hard-boiled Fiction here.