American Hardboiled Fiction

Hardboiled storytelling

Origins and evolution

The evolution of hardboiled storytelling spans from Western pulps, through gangster stories and films, to dime novels and urbanized hardboiled storytelling, such as the works of the Black Mask boys.

French criminal Eugène François Vidocq

Eugène François Vidocq was a French criminal who decided to give his knowledge to the police, effectively becoming a criminalist. He became the founder and first director of the crime-detection Sûreté Nationale, as well as the head of the first known private detective agency. Vidocq is considered the father of modern criminology, the French police department, and the first private detective. His life inspired several writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, particularly with his character C. Auguste Dupin, embodying the idea of the private investigator (PI), someone who had never been officially in the police, unlike Sherlock Holmes.

Edgar Allan Poe and detective fiction

Edgar Allan Poe is considered the inventor of detective stories, creating tales featuring C. Auguste Dupin. He established elements that later developed into the detective fiction genre, such as the urban setting in cities like Paris and London, which marked a difference from Western stories. The comparison between Dupin and Sherlock Holmes helps in storytelling, similarly to how Detective Watson is used in Dupin's narratives.

The Man of the Crowd and hardboiled archetypes

"The Man of the Crowd" is a short story from 1840 that is considered the origin of the dark novel and an archetype of the American hardboiled genre. It features a first-person narrator, an urban setting, and uses a chase as a narrative technique, forming a circular story with moral value. The hardboiled detective in these stories is depicted as someone between a middle-class man, a criminal, and the law.

After an unnamed illness, the unnamed narrator sits in an unnamed coffee shop in London. While sitting there, "a decrepit old man, some 65 or 70 years of age," attracts his attention. The narrator leaves the coffee shop and starts chasing the man who never stops anywhere, never buys anything, leading to a chase that lasts all night and into the next morning. Exhausted, the narrator concludes the man is "the type and genius of deep crime" due to his inscrutability and inability to leave the crowds of London. The story is built on a chase detective story, but without a conclusion.

Gangster stories and cultural impact

From the 1910s to the 1920s, gangster stories became successful. These stories feature gangsters coming from the country to the city, following money. The typical pattern involves the rise and fall of gangsters, humanizing them and making them American heroes, akin to self-made men. The themes include being fair to the gang as you are to your family, a principle upon which the mafia is based.

Red Harvest and the hardboiled school

"Red Harvest" (1929) by Dashiell Hammett is a pivotal work in hardboiled storytelling. It depicts criminality built around gangs that control power, with cities organized more around this power than traditional authority figures like mayors or police. The story describes a detective from a national agency investigating a murder in a Western mining town named Personville, sardonically called "Poisonville" by locals. The town's leading reformer was murdered, and his father hires the detective, known as the Op, to clean up the town.

The town has no good guys; everyone is involved in some form of corruption, wearing shades of gray—unlike Westerns that always have a hero. The Op uses his resources to play both sides against the middle. Although there are no movies of this novel, Akira Kurosawa's 1961 film "Yojimbo" has a similar plot and numerous parallels.

Black Mask magazine and pulp stories

Black Mask was a magazine that published pulp stories for a large audience, featuring colored, attractive fiction primarily aimed at men. It began publishing after the Civil War, coinciding with the rise of radio popularity. The connection to radios included series with narrative styles based heavily on dialogues and facts. Sometimes, these stories were published in smart sets, which were not pulps but printed on better and more expensive paper, aimed at a limited audience.

Initially, Black Mask was aimed at African Americans in town, but this idea was soon dropped as it became a magazine based on detective fiction, supernatural themes, and exotic lands. It evolved into a true detective story magazine full of action, where characters sometimes used black masks, such as women depicted as either victims or temptresses.

In 1926, Captain Joseph T. Shaw became the director and centered the magazine around hardboiled fiction. Shaw singled out Dashiell Hammett for his simplicity, clarity, and plausibility, forming the hardboiled school of detective fiction. The objective was a realistic style, allowing characters to act and talk tough, demonstrating abilities instead of just talking about them.

Ritualized scenes and the ethos of hardboiled fiction

• Client goes to the office to negotiate a contract
• PI is never safe, not even in their own office
• Routine of detective life
• Change of role: from being the hunted to being the hunter, or vice versa

Everything in hardboiled fiction is taken back to the ethos of hunting: a Darwinistic world of the survival of the fittest, where the best hunters anticipate the animal's behavior.

Modernism and transformation

In the 1930s, films were made as if serialized, sharing the same settings and classic black-and-white aesthetics, utilizing shadow and light play to save money for studios. During modernism, there was an emergence of consciousness that culture is a fragmentary assembly of voices and institutions in conflict, accentuating elements of popular fiction and entertainment.

By the 1950s, there was a crisis in detective and hardboiled stories. As hardboiled fiction is genre writing, there must be an escalation to keep the genres fresh. In the 1960s, discussions in literature emerged about the death of the novel, seeming exhausted and impossible to write new stories. Similarly, there were discussions about the death of film studies.

Literary influences and detective fiction origins

• Adventure story: a Western taking place elsewhere, a morality play about retribution, not redemption, where the lawman is similar to the outlaw in his use of violence
• Picaresque story: open-ended initiation tale, emphasizing action and exploration through a boldly drawn central character
• Gothic fiction: substrata of horror, decline of traditional belief systems
• Domestic fiction: focused on manners, questioning traditional patriarchal authority