The fictional characters Sam Spade and Philip
Marlowe, quintessential lone wolves who earned their living in a violent
world guided only by their individual moral codes, personify the genre
known as "hard-boiled" detective fiction. Originating in the 1920s, this
literary form developed with a distinctive voice and style, which was
exemplified by
Dashiell Hammett and
Raymond Chandler in the stories they wrote for the magazine Black Mask and which has endured well into the 21st century.
Black Mask began publication in 1920, and
although its fortunes rose and fell before it finally ceased publication
in 1951, the magazine and its rivals (collectively known as the
"pulps") changed the face of the detective story (a class of
mystery story). Many critics believe the hard-boiled detective genre
was born with the publication of "The Road Home" (by Dashiell Hammett,
writing under the pseudonym Peter Collinson) and "The False Burton
Combs" (by Carroll John Daly) in the November 1922 issue of Black Mask.
The movement hit its stride the following year with the appearance of
Daly's creations Terry Mack and Race Williams, who were considered to be
the genre's first real hard-boiled detectives. In describing himself,
Race Williams described the individuals who would dominate the genre for
the next 20 years: "I'm what you might call the middle man," he says,
"just a half-way house between the dicks and the crooks . . . but my
conscience is clear; I never bumped off a guy who didn't need it."
In 1923 the magazine debuted one of Hammett's
creations, the Continental Op, an unnamed detective specifically
described by the writer as "hard boiled." An ex-detective himself,
Hammett began writing in 1922. The following year 6 of his stories were
published, 3 of them in Black Mask. In all, the magazine
published over 50 Hammett pieces between 1923 and 1936, including four
novel serializations. An author of over 80 short stories and five
novels, Hammett possessed a terse writing style, and, through his
creation of cynical characters and complex plotlines, he was able to
bring a new energy to detective fiction, establishing a style other
writers would seek to emulate.
The works of Hammett and his contemporaries reflected the life of the 1920s, a decade of
prohibition,
speakeasies, and bootleggers. Corruption seemed rampant, and
gangsters were viewed as part villain, part hero. As the hard-boiled
detective genre developed, it offered stories that captured the
perceived reality of life during this period. Fiction appearing in Black Mask
and other pulps featured tough-guy protagonists, loners who obeyed a
private code of ethics and sought a small degree of justice in a
less-than-perfect world. Stylistically the stories favored harsh realism
and terse dialogue.
By 1930 Black Mask's circulation had risen to more than 100,000. In subsequent years, however, sales declined owing to the effects of the
Great Depression, the introduction of rival magazines, and the
desertion of many of the magazine's best writers, including Hammett, who
left to devote his talents to the more lucrative fields of movie and
radio writing. By 1935 sales had fallen to 60,000.
Although the Depression dealt a major blow to the
magazine, it also gave it a new star: Raymond Chandler. After losing
his job with an oil company, 50-year-old Chandler decided to become a
writer. His first Black Mask story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot,"
appeared in December 1933, featuring a hero named Mallory, the
precursor to Chandler's signature creation, Philip Marlowe, who debuted
six years later in the novel The Big Sleep (1939). "Blackmailers Don't Shoot" shares the style that marked Black Mask
fiction overall: wisecracks, one-liners, underworld lingo, and
metaphors such as "a city where pretty faces are as common as runs in
dollar stockings." Marlowe, like Hammett's Sam Spade introduced in The Maltese Falcon (1930), was a tough private eye who, nevertheless, lived by an inviolable code of honor.
While Black Mask and the pulps faded, the
hard-boiled detective genre remained popular, albeit in a somewhat
altered form. One star practitioner was
Mickey Spillane, who began writing for the pulps in the 1930s and
continued to write into the 21st century. Spillane's creation, Mike
Hammer, is unquestionably a representative of the "hard-boiled"
detective school. Introduced in the 1947 novel I, the Jury, Hammer was still plying his trade in Black Alley,
published in 1996. Although his character echoes those of previous
writers, Spillane's style differs from that of his predecessors in its
use of scenes containing graphic sex and sadism.
The genre's first female practitioner is said by
some to be Marcia Muller, whose protagonist, Sharon McCone, appeared in
1977 in Edwin of the Iron Shoes. The debate over the genre's
survival continues, with some critics believing that writers such as
James Ellroy, Joseph Wambaugh, Lawrence Block, Robert B. Parker, and Sue
Grafton are heirs to the Black Mask legacy, and others arguing
that hard-boiled detectives have disappeared as sensibilities have
changed and machismo has gone out of fashion. Whether today's writers
fit the mold is a matter of conjecture, but on late-night television,
the attraction of
Humphrey Bogart's portrayal of Philip Marlowe remains as potent, as masculine, as hard-boiled a tribute to the genre as one could wish.
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