Purpose and Structure of the Group

[Dan, Hardboiled]

This group first started as a fiction group devoted solely to American hardboiled crime fiction which had its birth after The Great War in the 1920s and its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s coinciding with film noir's greatest period, though some is still being written even as late as this year.

I originally envisioned our group as mainly focusing on that great 1940s and 1950s period of American fiction. It's not widely read any more and can sometimes be hard to locate. Popular fiction always pursues the new and the flashy modern writer. It's where the market and the majority of new sales to be made is after all. Perhaps because of its close ties to pulp fiction, academia does not embrace or study hardboiled fiction much either. I regard that as truly unfortunate because much of this period literature is well-written and deserving of classic status. The purpose of this group is thus to unearth the forgotten classics of a time-forgotten period of literature from a specific locale, namely the United States of America.

From the above description of the group's purpose, you can probably immediately see a problem, particularly if you don't live in the U.S. What about the rest of the world? Why should we be interested in your country's literature from some arbitrary past period from a not highly regarded genre? Frankly, I don't have an answer to that question. Either you are interested, or you're not. Suit yourself.

But that is my answer now. It wasn't my answer earlier. In 2021, I agreed to an expansion of the group's focus and we added international noir fiction, which to my mind is something of a development from its roots, American hardboiled fiction. Noir fiction is being written all over the world, and has been since American film noir developed as such a popular international film genre in the 1940s. Authors worldwide wanted to write fiction based on the paths taken by these classic film noir movies, only they quite understandably wanted to set their stories locally and use their own local cultures. I had moderator volunteers willing to preside over this expansion and run this part of the group. So I agreed to grow the group's aim to include a wider potential audience interest.

However, now having read some, I do not find myself all that interested in noir as a genre of literature. It's grimmer and more sordid, it seems to me, than most hardboiled fiction, more about mistreatment of fellow humans, and often on a larger scale, than simply trying to get away with a self-advancing crime on an individualized local level as in hardboiled fiction. Noir deals with bigger themes of good and evil and usually lacks humor. Hardboiled fiction often treats of the not so intelligent, a frequent source for humor. And quite honestly, I more frequently encounter in my daily life people who lack intelligence rather than evil people. Therefore, I personally can relate to hardboiled themes easier than noir themes.

Since the group had somewhat gotten away from me and the literature I was interested in reading, I abandoned the group in January 2022 with the hope that moderators interested in international noir fiction would go ahead and run the group the way they saw fit. That was more than fine with me. Unfortunately, rather than that happening, simply nothing happened instead. The group has done absolutely nothing these past two years.

Okay, so I'm back. But I am not back to do noir right now. I am back to do "classic" hardboiled American fiction. I am going to leave the group's title as it is though just in case I get a moderator volunteer at some future time who is interested in helping run the group and is willing to do the noir side. That would be ideal. If not, maybe I'll get a wild hair and decide to try an international noir novel once or perhaps even twice a year. There is some noir that interests me coming out of Australia currently called outback noir. And I've always wished to know more about Scandanavia's noir scene. I'll try to keep an open mind.

So the structure of the group is fairly traditional to normal Goodreads structure. We'll have book nominations on occasion, polls run for selecting from candidate reads, and a featured book we read and comment on together when we choose a book to share. It's the reading book club concept translated to the online world of Goodreads.

You can find on our bookshelf all the books we have read in the past. Somewhere in our discussion archives will be a topic for discussing each and every book we have read. Book discussion topics never close. If we read a book in 2021, but you are only getting around to it in 2026, feel free to post anew to that book's topic. I have read 16 of the 17 books on our bookshelf. Some other members have read all or most of the books on our bookshelf as well. I think you'll find other members of the club willing to engage you if you have an interesting insight to share on the book, or a question asking for opinions about some aspect of the book. In fact, there's no reason to restrict your comments on the current book under discussion. If another book on our bookshelf interests you more, locate a copy of that book and start reading it. At minimum, I'm willing to engage you on it if you start posting about it.

Please feel free to comment to this topic if you have any observations, questions, or suggestions regarding the purpose and structure of the group. We can always discuss that topic!

[Still]

Please define your taste in Hardboiled: P.I., Westerns, Cops, Spy… Hardboiled encompasses a number genres - including Science-Fiction or what used to be called Speculative Fiction.
Thanks-
Still

[Dan, Hardboiled]

The definition I use for hardboiled fiction can be found in this Goodreads post (the first one I wrote for the genre considerations folder): https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/.... It's pretty much just an expansion of Wikipedia's, found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardboiled.

I consider hardboiled American crime fiction its own specific genre. Other genres, such as speculative fiction, may use elements of the hardboiled fiction genre in its writing, but I would classify the work in question primarily as speculative fiction, or more helpfully one of the speculative fiction genres (Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, or Weird, etc.) with hardboiled elements, rather than hardboiled fiction per se.

[Still]

Thanks!