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.