ABSTRACT
Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op in Red Harvest (1929) is described as a ‘hard-boiled, pig-headed guy’ (Hammett 1992: 85), and the term ‘hard-boiled’, meaning ‘tough’ or ‘shrewd’, came to describe the hero of a type of detective fiction that developed in the United States in the interwar period. The private detective had already appeared in the shape of the New York detective Nick Carter, a character originally created by John R. Coryell in the 1880s, but it is John Daly’s Race Williams who is generally acknowledged as the first hard-boiled detective hero. Williams is a large, tough, violent man, and is clearly the prototype for many hardboiled heroes, from Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe to Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, although as a model he was quickly superseded, and has been all but forgotten. It was Hammett, more than any other author, who set the foundation for a type of fiction that was characterised, among other things, by the ‘hard-boiled’ and ‘pig-headed’ figure of the private investigator around which the sub-genre developed, a threatening
and alienating urban setting, frequent violence, and fast-paced dialogue that attempted to capture the language of ‘the streets’. These are the same streets that Chandler refers to in his famous description of the hard-boiled private eye in The Simple Art of Murder :
Both Chandler and Hammett, whom Chandler consciously emulated, began their careers in the pulp magazines by publishing short stories in Black Mask magazine, the most influential and successful of the pulps, before publishing novels. The ‘pulps’, as they were pejoratively termed because of the cheap paper on which they were printed, were inexpensive, weekly publications with lurid and garish covers intended to catch the attention of a reading public weaned on the sensational stories typical of the ‘dime novel’. The dime novel, which first began to appear during the American Civil War, and which, like its literary descendant the pulp magazine, played an enormous part in creating popular literary tastes in the United States, printed sensational stories targeted at a large and rapidly growing reading audience. John Coryell’s New York detective Nick Carter first appeared in the dime novel, anticipating the pattern of relocating the frontier hero of the Western into an urban environment that is generally credited to Hammett.
