William Marling,Ph.D. Professor of English, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA
The Second Generation of Hard-Boiled Writers
Classic Writers
Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar)
Development of Hard-Boiled Narrative
Early Female Authors of Hard-Boiled Writing
Chester Himes and Early Afro-American Detectives
Major Works
Red Harvest (1927) by Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon (1929) by Dashiell Hammett
The Glass Key (1931) by Dashiell Hammett
The Big Sleep (1939) by Raymond Chandler
Farewell, My Lovely (1940) by Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye (1953) by Raymond Chandler
The Galton Case (1959) by Ross Macdonald
The Underground Man (1971) by Ross Macdonald
Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) by Chester Himes
Characteristics of the Genre
Imagery in Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction
Criticism, 1930 to the Present
Detective Fiction in Comics, Radio, and Television
Film Noir
Reactions against Early Crime Movies
More Film Noir (brief takes on The Glass Key (1942), Murder, My Sweet (1944), Farewell, My Lovely (1975), The Big Sleep (1946), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, 1981), The Lady in the Lake (1947), The Lady From Shanghai (1949), Criss Cross (1949), D.O.A. ((1950), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Touch of Evil (1958), Chinatown (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), Body Heat (1981), and The Ususual Suspects (1995).
Hard-boiled fiction rose from the pulps to prominence in the U.S. during the 1930s and 1940s. Not only did it reflect the pressures of the Depression and World War II, but it also offered a code for dealing with physical and economic conflict. Its villains changed from the small-time hoodlums of "Old Cap Collier" at the turn of the century to adventurers such as Casper Gutman of The Maltese Falcon (1930) and then to "white-collar criminals" like Walter Huff of Double Indemnity (1936). It began to incorporate sexual opportunism as a parallel theme, whether in male characters such as Frank Chambers of The Postman Always Rings Twice or in female ones such as Eileen Wade of The Long Goodbye. In the 1950s and 1960s Raymond Chandler and then Ross Macdonald delved into the psychology of their characters, bringing the genre to a point where it could employ a greater variety of plots, which suited the demands of movies and later of television. The genre had a formula, so audiences expected certain narrative elements, which writers and directors found easy to supply. Yet it could be varied to emphasize romance, violence, suspense, psychology, or popular political concerns such as Communism. Film accelerated the division of the genre into sub-genres, and since so many hard-boiled writers worked in Hollywood at some point, the exploration of new narrative variations proceeded quickly.
The Second Generation
It is not surprising that some of the writers grouped below as a "second generation" were considered amoral or decadent in their time. They offered a pleasing subversion of the rules of an increasingly powerful society, and they warned of dire penalties if you got caught -- and you always did. This predestined fatality proved highly attractive to audiences, so the genre invoked issues of personal, social, or political concern to test their potency as catalysts of fatality. Mickey Spillane’s demonization of Mafiosi and Communists, his abysmal portraits of large cities and his misogynist depictions of women offer a kind of comic book version of McCarthyism. Jim Thompson’s schizophrenic killers epitomize a post-World War II dread about soldiers returning to society – a fear the G.I.s themselves often had, which we now term "post-traumatic stress." Cornell Woolrich reinvented Poe's tale of terror at a time when the threat of nuclear annihilation was serious. Ross Macdonald brought Freudian analysis from the university, where millions of students were learning it, to explain to a mass public why good people do bad things.
These four authors represent the four main directions of hard-boiled fiction in the 1950s and early 1960s. A comic-book writer to begin with, Spillane represents the reduction of the genre to pure action. We need only remember that Hammett supervised and sometimes scripted the comic strip Secret Agent X-9. Click here to see the link to Dick Tracy, Batman, and Superman (Radio, TV, and Comics). Characterization, development, and plausibility were discarded in this domain. Here female characters are either mothers or femmes fatales, used and discarded. Heroes and villains were easily identified. As several scholars have noted, these trends find perfect expression later in the movies of Clint Eastwood. The Harlem novels of Chester Himes fall into this category, as does the early work of 1960s author Ishmael Reed, both showing that simplification can add irony or black humor. Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen continue this trend.
The focus on the mentally unbalanced protagonist represented by Thompson’s work was also amplified. Hemingway had made such characters the legitimate material of modernist fiction ("The Battler," "The Killers," both 1925). The mechanics of brutality or murder figure importantly, though the protagonists claim amnesia or blackouts. If some of these descriptions are as lurid as tabloid news photos, it is well to recall that photographers figured in earlier hard-boiled fiction as investigators and recorders of carnage ("Murder Mix-up," George Harmon Cox, Black Mask May, 1936). In the late 1940s and 1950s the photographic work of Weegee, the New York tabloid photographer of Mafia and car crash victims, parallels the publications of Thompson. A bit later came the grisly reportage of such New Journalism classics as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) and the junkie fiction of William Burroughs.
It was difficult for the second generation to surpass the founders stylistically. Hammett’s terseness, Chandler’s metaphors, and Macdonald’s detailed psychological plots set a very high standard. Yet there were other possibilities, which these writers, because of the nature of their gifts, the conventions of narrative, or public taste at the times they wrote, explored instead: different narrative points of view, graphic descriptions of sex and violence, political themes, female detectives, self-caricature, and fragmented plots assembled by readers. The survey below is not exhaustive, but intended to show the major directions taken in the genre. Some writers on the margin of the hard-boiled, such as John D. MacDonald and Amanda Cross, have been left out, since the edges do not define the genre.