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African-American detectives & authors

  Chester Himes was not the first black crime or detective novelist, or the first with a black detective. Rudolph Fisher (1897 - 1934), below right, an African-American, holds that distinction, for a little-known classic of the Harlem Renaissance, The Conjure-Man Dies (1932), which featured a black police detective and a black policeman who investigate …

The Big Sleep (novel & film)

Chandler's first novel introduces Philip Marlowe, the genre's most influential series detective. His wise-cracking style and capacity to endure punishment from his foes introduced a new kind of "performance" to hard-boiled fiction, in which victory was more often verbal than physical. Chandler's ironic tone and extraordinary metaphors focused readers on individual scenes, which he excelled …

Black Mask magazine

The first significant hard-boiled authors appeared around 1923 and at the same magazine, The Black Mask. Ironically, The Black Mask was created to help pay the costs of Smart Set, which was similar to today's New Yorker. Its founders were drama critic George Jean Nathan and iconoclast critic Henry L. Mencken. When Smart Set floundered …

Bogart, Humphrey DeForest (1899-1957)

Humphrey DeForest Bogart was chiefly a stage actor, in fact a typecast gangster, until he broke through to stardom in 1941 with noir roles in High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon. The next year his role in Casablanca made him the biggest male star in Hollywood and crystallized a new persona, that of the tough …

Comics, Radio & TV

Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald tried to make hard-boiled fiction more literary, but other writers kept on working in the pulps, where the genre had begun. Many of these writers had one foot in Hollywood, and they took the characters, plots, and conventions of the hard-boiled to movies, radio, and television as those media developed. Most …

Cotton Comes to Harlem (novel & film)

Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) is the eighth of ten "Harlem Domestic" detective novels that Himes wrote, and it follows the formula of its predecessors. An outrageous crime causes a chain-reaction of violence in "lawless" Harlem. Black detectives "Coffin" Ed Jones and "Gravedigger" Johnson are called in to restore order. The initial event in this …

The Detective Code

When the protagonist is a detective, she or he is presumed to have a set of ethics or moral values. These are called "the detective code," or simply "the code," when discussing the genre. The basics of the code are best summarized by what James Wright of the Pinkerton Detective Agency taught Dashiell Hammett about …

Double Indemnity (novel & film)

James M. Cain (right) had written an eight-part serial, "Double Indemnity," for Liberty magazine in 1936. Part reworking of Postman, part recollection of his youth selling insurance, the novel Double Indemnity  (1941)  portrayed a corporate/legal control of life that amounted to "double jeopardy" and appealed to Depression readers' sense of helplessness. (Hoopes 1982: 248).    …

Evolution of the genre (after 1940)

Hard-boiled fiction rose from the pulps to prominence in the U.S. during the 1930s and 1940s. Not only did it reflect the pressures of the Depression and World War II, but it also offered a code for dealing with physical and economic conflict. Its villains changed from the small-time hoodlums of "Old Cap Collier" at …