Hard-Boiled Intimations

Abstract

The opening chapter explains the sudden advent of hard-boiled writing in the 1920s, to clarify why this curious genre emerged when it did, and what continues to beguile readers as much formally as narratively. If that hardly frames a new critical perspective, the questions are still worth reviewing to show why sociological, historical, even formalist interpretations so often misunderstand the appeal. A more productive approach that focuses on strategies of early hard-boiled writing discloses how it anticipated later, genuinely accomplished detective fiction, which diverts readers’ eyes seductively away from plot and psychology. The most celebrated of early writers—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James Cain—indelibly stamped the genre by deflecting attention from plot to the interest objects hold in themselves. As well, they created fictional heroes notable for garish self-expression rather than credible character, and who thus finally (if paradoxically) remain winningly two-dimensional.