The Hard-Boiled PI part 2

 The Pulps and "The Black Mask"

In the late 1890s, the dime novel we considered in the previous post gave way to the "pulp" magazine, a colorful, action-packed weekly or monthly printed on cheap wood-pulp paper (hence the name). These were full of short stories and serialized novels appealing to adolescent tastes. In 1915 the first detective pulp, Nick Carter Weekly, appeared. Action Detective, Great Gangster Stories, Clues, Nickel Detective, Spicy Detective, Thrilling Detective and many others quickly hit the newsstands.

The Black Mask became the most important pulp in detective fiction. It was founded by HL Menchen, a highbrow journalist and critic who wished to support quality literature by investing in pulps. With his money, and with the insight of his editors (who actually did editing), The Black Mask discovered Dash Hammett and Raymond Chandler and others, striving for high standards in writing.

Hard Boiled and Golden Age Stories

Far from the cultured worlds of the Golden Age, hardboiled stories showed crime as cruel and criminals as dirty. Death is never clean and off-stage; it is violent and takes many victims at once. Throats get slit. Dogs maul bodies. We get rotting corpses in Chandler's "Farewell, My Lovely"; we enter the world of porn in "The Big Sleep". Hardboiled stories are full of dope-heads, sex fiends, gamblers, gangsters, crooked cops, and dangerous dames (as they would have called them). Readers are not transported to cozy country estates and sleepy villages but, as Chandler says in his famous essay "The Simple Art of Murder," they are thrown into the "mean streets", full of squalor and stupid criminals.

Neither is the detective an educated, mannered socialite, but a working-class hero who must work for a living and take lousy, dangerous jobs to make ends meet. He is, in the words of the character Race Williams, "a middleman, just a halfway house between the cops and the crooks." Because of this, the hero is often isolated, lonely, and cynical. He might smoke and drink a lot. He is idealistic and a bit sentimental, a tough guy, with a noble heart. Part of the toughness comes through in the wise-cracking dialog, as well as the readiness to sock someone--even a woman--in the kisser.

And yes, they are nearly all men. We don't really get hardboiled female detectives until Sara Peretsky's breakthrough VI Warshawski in 1982 and Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone and Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone and Laura Lippman's Tess Monaghan and--well, women pretty much took over the sub-genre beginning in the 1980s. But in the 30s and 40s, it's a man's world. Women are usually dangerous and seductive and have little place in the hero's life. Dash Hammett might be an exception, since three fully-realized women complicate Sam Spade's work wonderfully in The Maltese Falcon and the hard-drinking, wisecracking Nick and Nora Charles of The Thin Man introduce a long line of wholly-developed husband-wife detective teams (surely his co-writer and lover, playwright Lillian Hellman, had a huge role in this). Everywhere else, the heroes are heterosexual, to be sure, but as Race Williams says, "I never took a woman seriously. My game and women don't go together."

Thus, hardboiled heroes are separated from everybody, unmarried, and loners. In a way, they follow the pattern of the Western. They prefer the aloofness of cowboys and value the same independence. They live an austere life apart from women and carry a gun. They seek justice and uphold a code of chivalry. They are reserved and committed to their turf.

There's more action and less talk in the traditional hardboiled story. And with so many sleazy people and so many crimes, the writer can easily hide the guilty characters and avoid giving away too much in all the confusion.

The chief characteristic of the hardboiled story, though, is its style. From the get-go, a reader knows from the terse, clipped prose that this is a hardboiled or 'noir' story. It is direct, uncluttered, full of slang and wisecracks. The directness highlights the action. The fast-paced slang is the real language of street-wise hoods. The smart wisecracks enhance the hero's toughness. Even with the ungrammatical dialog and slang, however, good hardboiled writers have an ear and eye for striking working-class metaphors, as when Philip Marlowe says his cigarette tasted "like a plumber's handkerchief."

By the 1950s, a new tough guy appeared: the cop. That's for next time.

Whiskey, Guns, and Lipstick: The Hardboiled Private Eye part 1

 Poe may have 'invented' the detective story, but it was mainly a British form into the 1930s. Yes, there were some French writers and a handful of Americans (Futrelle, SS Van Dine, Carr, and Queen) who imitated the Brits.

But the hard-boiled detective story that took hold in the 1930s was authentically American.

By the 30s, the work of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain muscled aside the dainty Golden-Agers. Tough Guy fiction emerged from pulp entertainment to a status of important social literature. With the hard-boiled story, the drive and innovation of the detective form moved from Britain to America. The roughness and realism was presented stylishly, and the detective story moved up from middle-brow amusement into the world of mainstream literature. 

Dime Novel Beginnings

As an American phenomenon, the hard-boiled story has its ancestry not in refined urban Victorians like Dickens and Collins, but in the frontier dime novel.

Beginning in the 1860s, publishers like Irwin Beadle printed action-packed stories on cheap paper, hawking 'a dollar book for a dime' in what looked more like a magazine. The "books" of 25,000 words were sold at newsstands and by subscription to the marginally-literate working class (a group just learning to read through compulsory education laws). Publishers hired hack writers who could crank out westerns (like "Deadwood Dick"), science stories ("Tom Swift" and his amazing inventions), rags-to-riches fables, pirate stories, and romances.

Also in the 1860s, the first real American detective, Allan Pinkerton, began to solve mysteries for Fox Valley, Illinois, police, and his detective agency saved Lincoln from an early assassination attempt. Pinkerton, like Vidocq, was a tireless self-publicist, and he spread his own fame through the country with books and lectures (photo below: Pinkerton, left, with Lincoln).

Because of Pinkerton and the growing popularity of "Police Gazette" newspapers, the dime novels soon became full of detectives: messenger boy, shoe-polisher, firefighter, postal worker, preacher detectives and others. The stories were written quickly, without editing, aimed at an undiscriminating audience that didn't care. It was disposable fiction for weary factory workers hoping to escape their misery for a little while.

The dime novel detectives were different from Doyle's Holmes, who was also appearing in magazines at this time. They weren't intellectuals. Dime detectives depended on disguises and surprises, and often on their fists. Knowing that young boys were the main audience, publishers insisted that the heroes demonstrate "manly" virtues of determination, tenacity, strength under control, honesty, and chivalry. Stories, therefore, were contrived in order to highlight these qualities. The plots did not depend on problems or puzzles to solve, since neither the detectives not the readers were brainy. Instead, readers knew in advance who the villains were, and they enjoyed watching the detective track them and catch them, just like in westerns. The detective story was, in effect, "the eastern".

Thus, commercial fiction which was regarded as mere entertainment was produced with the deliberate purpose of educating young boys in 'manliness' and in their proper moral duty. The non-intellectual, highly moral, sometimes violent detective of the dime novel became the model for the hard-boiled PI.