William Marling,Ph.D. Professor of English, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA
Summary
The American Roman Noir: Hammett, Cain, and Chandler
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 traces its roots to popular fiction read during the American Civil War. The "yellowbacks" that soldiers carried in their pockets were printed on cheap, fast-decaying pulp newsprint. These were simple tales of adventure that stressed stressed conventional values and romance, but they were read even by the President.
After the War, printers changed the content but continued to publish in this format. They focussed on frontier stories, and then on cowboy and detective fiction. Western hero/ines such as Deadwood Dick and Annie Oakley were followed by urban detectives such as Old Cap Collier and Old Sleuth. Soon afterwards, the public became interested in the works of Allen Pinkerton, founder of the private detective agency. These influences combined to set off one branch of the mystery story, which had been pioneered by Edgar Allan Poe in the 1840s, on a distinctly different path from the erudite school of detective fiction led by English writer Arthur Conan Doyle.
Hard-boiled fiction came clearly into focus with Black Mask magazine in the early 
1920s and the publication of Carroll John Daley's Race Williams stories (Right: the May, 1920 issue). This magazine drew to it the toughest and most stylistically distinct practioners, such as Dashiell Hammett, Paul Cain, Erle Stanley Gardner, Horace McCoy, and Raymond Chandler. Other magazines entered the field, until there were over fifty by 1927. Respectable book publishers, such as Alfred Knopf, began to publish the leading authors, and Hollywood took an interest, hiring some of them to script movies. Classic hard-boiled fiction has had these two bases ever since. Some of its practicioners, such as W. R. Burnett and Cornell Woolrich, achieved their reputations in Hollywood.
The main line of development in the genre is usually traced from Dashiell Hammett through Raymond Chandler to Ross Macdonald, each author advancing on themes or directions made evident but not fully explored by his predecessor. Macdonald brought the hard-boiled novel to the point of social comment, which permitted the specialized and regional emphases that began in the 1970s and have continued through the 1990s.
Hard-boiling writing attracted other media beginning around 1930. Radio stations broadcast detective shows beginning in 1930, and film explored hard-boiled themes through crime movies. With "Dick Tracy" in 1931 newspapers began to print a daily detective strip, and comic books followed. The movie industry's embrace waited on technological advances and the economic pressures of the Depression. Hard-boiled novels such as The Glass Key were filmed in the late 1930s, but the classic period of film noir was 1944 to 1958. Radio detectives remained popular through the early 1960s.
Hard-boiled fiction remains as popular today as it was in the period between 1920 and 1950, but it is written by far more writers in far more styles. There are women, Black, Hispanic, and Native American detectives. They operate in almost every state of the union. The genre has won intellectual respect and is the subject of academic scholarship. Movies based on published hard-boiled fiction are less common than earlier; instead much current film noir is made from original scripts that employ the traditional motifs. Films such as Pulp Fiction (1994) Sin City (2005) and Grindhouse (2007)combine an appreciation of hard-boiled fiction and film noir with post-modern aesthetics. In addition to the American brand of hard-boiled prose and film, local varieties are written, read and viewed in nations around the world, suggesting that hard-boiled fiction may be one of the first global genres of popular narrative.