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What are the ingredients of a hard-boiled detective story? "Savagery, style, sophistication, sleuthing and sex," said Ellery Queen. Often a desperate blond, a jealous husband, and, of course, a tough-but-tender P.I. the likes of Sam Spade or Philop Marlowe. Perhaps Raymond Chandler summed it up best in his description of Dashiell Hammett's style: "Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it....He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes." Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories is the largest and most comprehensive collection of its kind, with over half of the stories never published before in book form. Included are thirty-six sublimely suspenseful stories that chronicle the evolutiuon of this quintessentially American art form, from its earliest beginnings during the Golden Age of the legendary pulp magazine Black Mask in the 1920s, to the arrival of the tough digest Manhunt in the 1950s, and finally leading up to present-day hard-boiled stories by such writers as James Ellroy. Here are eight decades worth of the best writing about betrayal, murder, and mayhem: from Hammett's 1925 tour de force "The Scorched Face," in which the disappearance of two sisters leads Hammett's never-named detective, the Continental Op, straight into a web of sexual blackmail amidst the West Coast elite, to Ed Gorman's 1992 "The Long Silence After," a gripping and powerful rendezvous involving a middle class insurance executive, a Chicago streetwalker, and a loaded .38. Other delectable contributions include "Brush Fire" by James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raymond Chandler's "I'll Be Waiting," where, for once, the femme fatale is not blond but a redhead, a Ross Macdonald mystery starring Macdonald's most famous creation, the cryptic Lew Archer, and "The Screen Test of Mike Hammer" by the one and only Micky Spillane. The hard-boiled cult has more in common with the legendary lawmen of the Wild West than with the gentleman and lady sleuths of traditional drawing room mysteries, and this direct line of descent is on brilliant display in two of the most subtle and tautly written stories in the collection, Elmore Leonard's "3:10 to Yuma" and John D. MacDonald's "Nor Iron Bars." Other contributors include Evan Hunter (better known as Ed McBain), Jim Thompson, Helen Nielsen, Margaret Maron, Andrew Vachss, Faye Kellerman, and Lawrence Block. Compellingly and compulsively readable, Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories is a page-turner no mystery lover will want to be without. Containing many notable rarities, it celebrates a genre that has profoundly shaped not only American literature and film, but how we see our heroes and oursleves.… (more)
User reviews
Part of the problem, as I see it, is evident in the introductory essay, where they spend three and a half half-assed, contradictory pages failing to describe what makes a hard-boiled crime story. They float a number of terms, some familiar to lit-crit and some not. They don't detail the application of the familiar ones to the hard-boiled story, and they don't even define the unfamiliar ones. They even seem to lump 'hard-boiled' and 'noir.' So, in the remainder of the essay, which is basically a 15-page publishing history of the genre/form/whatever (they use both words, apparently interchangeably), when they say that this author or that period expanded the definition or broadened the genre/form/whatever, I was left wondering, WTF? Because as far as I can tell, most of the later (mid-1950s on) stories that are included can only be included if one uses a (to my mind) overly broad definition of hard-boiled, which they do, but they never tell you what their definition is. They just paste on the hard-boiled label to suit themselves. All of this is particularly ironic given their complaint in the first paragraph of the intro essay about the misuse and misunderstanding of the hard-boiled label and genre/form/whatever.
In summary: good stories, bad anthologizing.
The editors are experts in their field, and an excellent feature of the book is the one- or two-page biographical overview of each author, preceding their work. The book also sports a useful long introduction by the editors which attempts to define the sub-genre of hardboiled crime fiction and to set it into proper context. In this task they succeed well, and the entire book is a delight to browse through and dip into -- to sample again the old favourites and also to learn about the lesser known. An essential buy for the lover of the hardboiled.
For the most part,
In the post pulp era, the authors included were Elmore Leonard, Ross Macdonald, Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain (Evan Hunter), and Lawrence Block along with unknowns (to me) Leigh Brackett, Helen Nielson and others.
I found the latter stories to be more morbid, more depressing, and less inclined to focus on atmosphere. The pulp mysteries were gritty and some had a more 'noir' feeling to them. The language in the pulps seemed to be more descriptive and thought out as well.
The editors included a little bio of each author, noting their best known works, anthologies and those that were made into films. Many of the authors had short careers, some moved into script writing and editing and some veered away from mysteries altogether.
Hard-Boiled is a well rounded anthology of crime stories and one that should be in every mystery lover's library
The stories are grouped by decade, with the 1930s being far and away the most fruitful period for the brand of terse, rough-and-tumble detective story which is generally associated with the term "hard-boiled." As the editors progress into the mid-1950s the old-fashioned private eyes begin to disappear, supplanted by the dreary amorality of noir. A few of these stories are okay (the Jim Thompson selection is pretty damned good, in fact), but noir and hard-boiled are not synonymous. These later tales have a different flavor, and their aimless, destructive nastiness is not to my liking.
Standouts: Hammett's "The Scorched Face", Whitfield's "Mistral" (arguably the best story in the book, and quite a departure from the author's usual cornball fare), Norbert Davis's "Who Said I Was Dead?", Macdonald's "Guilt-Edged Blonde" and Thompson's "Forever After."