ABSTRACT
Hard-boiled themes, structures, and devices have had an enormous influence on the development of the genre of crime fiction, from the police procedural to what is often broadly termed the crime thriller, the main focus of which is the crime, and the criminal committing it. The relationship between hard-boiled fiction and the crime thriller is an important one, and John G. Cawelti underlines this when he identifies the emergence, in the 1920s, ‘of two major formulaic figures in the literature of crime: the urban gangster and the hard-boiled detective’ (Cawelti 1976: 59). The observation is a significant one, for various reasons. It was in 1929, the year of the Wall Street Crash and the beginning of the Great Depression, that two of the most sharply defined examples of the urban
gangster and the hard-boiled detective appeared in fiction, the former in the figure of Cesare Bandello in W.R. Burnett’s Little Caesar and the latter in the figure of the nameless Continental Op in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. Furthermore, Cawelti’s identification of both these figures as ‘formulaic’ echoes the prevalent literary view of the crime thriller as a genre, as formulaic popular literature populated with cardboard characters and employing conventional and well-worn themes, structures, and devices (Glover 2003: 135).
