The Hard-Boiled Detective - Lecture Notes 1

Literary Influences: The Hard Boiled Detective Novel

Notes from a Lecture by Dr. David E. Whillock, Professor and Associate Dean of the College of Communications at TCU. Presented Sept. 5, 2007 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth as part of a series titled: American Cinema: Film Noir and the Detective Film.

[The sources of this material include a history of Black Mask magazine written by Keith Alan Deutsch and available in full at BlackMaskMagazine.com]

The hard-boiled detective novel is a genre developed by American writers in the 1920s. Among the first hard-boiled detectives was Terry Mack who first appeared in Carroll John Daly’s story “ Three Gun Terry” in the May 15,1923, issue of Black Mask, a popular fiction magazine founded by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan in April, 1920.

Mencken and Nathan ( a well-known literary figure and drama critic respectively) started Black Mask to make money when their more intellectual, high-brow periodical Smart Set failed to do so). The first issue offered, "Five magazines in one: the best stories available of adventure, the best mystery and detective stories, the best romances, the best love stories, and the best stories of the occult." After only eight issues (priced at 15 cents per issue), the founders sold Black Mask for a huge profit.

Where the original magazine had only a few pages of detective stories (along with all its other attractions) and they were like the standard British detective stories of Arthur Conan-Doyle , Agatha Christie, and others, [Did you know that A.A. Milne, creator of Winnie the Pooh, wrote “one of the glories of this literature, an acknowledged masterpiece” of the genre The Red House Mystery?] it was a new editor of Black Mask hired in 1926 who really emphasized the realistic, tough-guy detective stories of the new genre. “Cap” Joseph Shaw brought a gritty, blue-collar outlook that became the new identity of the magazine. As Shaw wrote in a 1927 editorial. "Detective fiction as we see it has only commenced to be developed. All other fields have been worked and overworked, but detective fiction has barely been scratched." By 1933, Black Magic was publishing nothing but crime stories. And hugely successful!
It was Daly’s “Three Gun Terry” that had started the new wave. The Americanized vocabulary and tough-guy vernacular illustrated by the quote below remain characteristic of the genre to this day:"I have a little office which says 'Terry Mack, Private Investigator,' on the door; which means whatever you wish to think it. I ain't a crook, and I ain't a dick. I play the game on the level, in my own way."
“Daly followed Terry Mack with a detective called Race Williams and it was this violent and wisecracking character who really set up the prototype for the hard boiled sleuth. The detective stories appearing in Black Mask grew more violent, the style harder, the dialogue blacker, and the wit dryer.” But it was Dashiel Hammitt whose writing seemed most to influence the detective genre and the magazine. “He alone seemed to have first realized the full potential of hard boiled detective fiction beyond its gunslinging appeal. As an ex-Pinkerton detective turned self-taught writer, Hammett was uniquely qualified to give his characters the three dimensions of which other writers of the tough detective story were largely incapable.” Another legendary author of the genre, Raymond Chandler, was first published in Black Mask in 1933.
[see excerpts from Chandler’s essay “The Simple Art of Murder” elsewhere on tviewlalabplus.blogspot.com]
Among the identifying characteristics of hard-boiled detective fiction are its use of rough, American vernacular and the tough guy exterior of its detectives. The detectives have their own soft spots and their own code of justice, but their code of justice is not the same as that of the society. One of the devices of the genre is the unfolding and testing of this code of justice.

Each hard-boiled detective has his own city, and his city is like a character in his tale. His relationship with his city is like his relationship with women, both as love object (salvation) and fatal attraction (destroyer). She is beautiful, but in his relationship with her, he peels back the layers of her reality and reveals her flaws and dangers.

Perhaps the development of the portrait of women in this genre owes something to the post-war change in the status of women. Remember, it was 1920 when women could first vote in federal elections, and, while their men were away at war, women at home had developed a new level of independence and self-reliance that would grow alongside the genre through the coming decades.

It is useful to contrast hard-boiled detective fiction with traditional English detective fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle and others (and to recall that among the earliest writers of such fiction was Edgar Allan Poe whose “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) featured the ratiocination of Inspector C. Auguste Dupin).

Patterns in Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction1. The drama of solution (on which traditional English detective fiction focused intently) is subordinated to the accomplishment of justice. It’s not so much about solving the case and seeing justice (as the detective interprets it) done.
2. The intimidation and the temptation of the detective are important elements of the plot whereas the traditional plots relied on elaborate back stories of the characters and crimes and back stories behind the back stories.
3. The hard boiled detective’s investigation of the crime always leads him to some sort of personal issue of self-doubt or self-image where the traditional English detective’s investigation typically leads him (or her) to a solution (with supreme confidence and little or no personal involvement).
4. Where his English predecessors were detached solvers of puzzles, the hard-boiled detective gets emotionally involved and morally committed to his cases, and his personal moral stance over against the criminal is highlighted. He is not merely solving a case but exorcising personal demons by bringing justice to the criminal.

Motifs in Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction

1. The detective is a marginal professional, operating in unsuccessful surroundings, living hand-to-mouth, always in debt and needing to make a little dough. Out of this setting emerges the reality of the question of what will it take to buy him off.
2. The detective chooses his marginal lifestyle because he rejects respectability and is incurably insubordinate and rebellious. This circumstance begs the question of his personal choices as vices or virtues and whether they will lead him to success or ruin.
3. The detective, though he chooses his own world, can function comfortably in various worlds: among the rich, his unintimidated honesty is prized; among the corrupt, he knows how to play the streetwise game. Among criminals and police, men and women (but often not so comfortably), he makes his confident, undeterred way. His adaptability sharpens the question of his own identity.
4. From the opening of the hard-boiled detective story or novel, the crime he sets out to investigate is never as simple as it first seems, and the detective himself entangles the detective himself in its implications. It’s not just that it gets more complicated but that his own involvement gets more complicated.
5. The detective is continually twisted emotionally, personally, even spiritually, by the changing landscapes and shifting situations revealed by his investigation.
6. There is a rhythm of exposure in the plot development as one exposed truth leads to another and that one to yet another, with each one presenting new ethical, personal challenges to the detective as much as obstacles to his solution of the case.

The Hard-Boiled Detective: The Ideal Type

He is fortyish and works alone, a man’s man with no family and a mostly unexplained past. He has many casual acquaintances emerging from that past, but few friends. He lives on fried eggs and steak, cigarettes and coffee, bourbon and Scotch. He either carries a gun or makes a point of not carrying one, and, in either case, he can take one away from almost anybody. He’s always short of cash. but he always has a few bucks to share. His relationship with the police ranges from ambivalence to contempt, and his relationship with women is similar. For him, sex is a double-edged sword of attraction and fear, and he often finds himself involved with a desirable but disturbed (and disturbing) female who is both buxom and blonde. The aggressive, dominant woman who controls weaker men is a challenge to his sexual status and himself, but like most challenges, he handles it well.