HARD-BOILED
If you are not into crime fiction, the expression “hard-boiled” can only refer to eggs. As I am both a writer and somewhat of a gastronome, it can mean both. But even if you enjoy Hammett and Chandler and other writers from Black Mask forward to today, what does it actually mean to you?
Sure, there are countless articles that provide basic descriptions: earthy and naturalistic realism; gritty, almost slang like dialogue; emphasis on sex as a weapon; graphic violence; sinister characters who are almost borderline sociopaths; and a definite tendency to be darkly urban. These descriptions are similar to those used to describe “film noir”, and yet even diehard fans of that film genre have a tendency to disagree on outliers that seem to have the traits but don’t fall into the traditional patterns.
I have no issue accepting Dashiell Hammett as one of the earliest advocates of the style, especially given his actual background as a Pinkerton operative. However, it is generally considered that Carroll John Daly wrote the first recognized hard-boiled short story, “The False Burton Combs”, in 1922. Nevertheless, Hammett is primarily credited as the writer who gave hard-boiled writing its teeth. No less an artist than Raymond Chandler wrote:
Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish… He is said to have lacked heart, yet the story he thought most of himself [The Glass Key] is the record of a man’s devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.
Ok, so now you have a handful of writers, a popular magazine, and a set of descriptions. Again, what does the expression mean to you? For the answer to that question, you might have to refer to Louis Armstrong’s quote: “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.” If you read enough of a certain genre, you get a feel for it and are able to identify whether it is classic in nature or an offshoot, a modernist revision, or a pale imitation.
At this point in time, having written four novels of historical crime fiction, I can honestly say none of them are particularly hard-boiled in the classic sense. They do draw on many of those descriptive notions referenced earlier but in many ways, the characters are unlike those found in “Red Harvest”, “The Dain Curse”, or “The Maltese Falcon.” The main character in the Ark City Confidential Chronicles is a facially scarred World War I veteran working as a beat cop in a small Kansas town. His past is cluttered with secrets, and he struggles with identity issues. These fall more under a film noir ideal.
However, I still fall back on my readings of those Black Mask writers and feel it provides a foundation to my efforts. Perhaps I am too immersed in contemporary ideals to completely free myself into a mindset that is nearly 100 years old. Nevertheless, whatever it is that I am producing, while not strictly hard-boiled, still contains high aspirations in that regard.
