The hardboiled thirties

by Michael Robison

Modern Library Publishers recently composed a list of the world's 100 greatest novels. Although such lists are as arbitrary as they are common, it's worth noting that at least nine books on the list which were published in the Thirties could be considered hardboiled or noir. This is more than the sum of hardboiled and noir titles for all the other years. With almost 80 years of hardboiled history, the Thirties stands out as the most innovative, influential, and exciting decade of them all. From the limited confines of the tough guy detective stories of the Twenties, the genre became more mainstream, branching into several new categories and having a profound effect on existing ones. The rags-to-riches glamour of the movie industry inspired a Hollywood theme. Socialism became vogue, and a hardboiled slant added new life to the Proletariat novel. A return to the pessimistic determinism of the American Naturalists brought noir, and a dark brooding wind from the South hailed the coming of Southern Gothic. The already well-established hardboiled detective story saw a refreshing divergence from the standard fare. This article examines several genres in the Thirties that were touched by the hardboiled fever, the historical and literary influences that shaped them, and their impact on the future of literature.

The hardboiled genre originated in the early Twenties with the tough guy detective stories of Dashiell Hammett and Carroll John Daly published in Black Mask pulp magazine. Their style was both a combination and mutation of the colloquialism of Twain, the toughness of Jack London and Stephen Crane, and the deductive powers of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.

More pointedly, the hardboiled style was a slap in the face to the status quo mystery genre. The hardboiled school rejected the dignified, upper class airs of the Golden Age mystery, and brought the business of crime solving down to the mean streets. Gin bottles replaced tea cups, the Queen's English became American slang, and the criminal met his match in the dark alleys and smoky bars instead of the town house parlor. Borrowing the Romanticist's hero and the cold cruel world of the American Naturalist, hardboiled is defined by its tough attitude and colloquial style.

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In 1926 Joseph "Cap" Shaw became editor of Black Mask and was soon resurrected as the driven and enthusiastic messiah of hardboiled. By the end of the Twenties he had gathered five disciples, Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, Raoul Whitfield, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Frederick Nebel to form the granite foundation for the temple of hardboiled, and Black Mask was the Word. Shaw preached realism in action, convincing motivation, and "simplicity for the sake of clarity, plausibility, and belief." This became known as the Black Mask style, and was undoubtedly the strongest influence on the hardboiled detective genre in the Thirties.

Partly because of the Black Mask style, the detective walked a narrow path in the Twenties, but the Thirties witnessed a healthy and invigorating expansion of the genre. One of the most obvious changes was the extension of the detective story to novel form. For most of the Twenties the hardboiled detective was confined to short stories. Shaw encouraged his writers to develop series characters, and those that took his advice soon realized they could make extra money with minimal effort by splicing their series stories together into a novel. Daly's Snarl Of The Beast, published in 1927, is the first hardboiled detective novel, which he followed in 1928 with The Hidden Hand. Hammett's Red Harvest and The Dain Curse are the only others to see print before the decade passed.

Raoul Whitfield broke new ground when he introduced his island detective series in Black Mask in 1930. Besides being the first hardboiled non-Caucasian detective, Philippine Jo Gar was markedly less macho, more reserved and thoughtful than his predecessors. These traits are foreshadowed by the earlier Whitfield stories that became his first novel Green Ice (1930). Compared to the brutal and harsh demeanor of Daly's Race Williams and Hammett's Con Op, Mal Ourney in Green Ice is noticeably milder and less aggressive. He doesn't carry a gun, he doesn't kill anybody, and he gets knocked out by a smaller guy in a fight.

Following the pattern established in the late Twenties, Hammett's The Maltese Falcon came out as a novel in 1931 after first being serialized in three issues of Black Mask. The Maltese Falcon stood out from most hardboiled detective literature in two respects. First, it concentrated less on plot and more on character interaction. The dynamic and complex relationship between Sam Spade and Brigid O'Shaughnessy achieves an aesthetic depth far beyond the standard fare. Second, Hammett wrote in a strict objective third person style that is highly effective. In what has also been called a "movie camera" style, absolutely no internal thoughts of the characters are revealed. The style is a dramatic break from the traditional detective narrative which relied heavily upon internal monologue to both analyze evidence and reveal character. Hammett's The Maltese Falcon stands out even today as a monumental achievement in hardboiled fiction.

Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, published in 1939, is the most influential detective novel ever written. His series detective Philip Marlowe remains today the dominant model for private investigator fiction. As crime writer Jim Doherty has noted, after The Big Sleep most protagonists in detective novels borrowed heavily from the Marlowe persona. According to Doherty, the Marlowe paradigm has eight criteria: being American, male, 30 to 40 years old, unmarried, an ex-cop, operating a single-person agency, located in a large U.S. city, and using first person narration. Doherty states, "Very few PIs who've appeared in Marlowe's wake fail to meet at least five or six of those eight traits, and a significant number, perhaps a majority, match the Marlowe paradigm in every single respect."

With respect to women detectives, he writes, "The most significant change in PI fiction over the last ten or twenty years has been the proliferation of women private eyes, but even they tend to follow the Marlowe paradigm in most respects. The most popular, Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone, follows it in every respect save for being female."

A common criticism leveled against the prototype detective character of the period is that he was so tough that his humanity was questionable. Chandler shifted away from this extreme image and moved closer to Hemingway's hero, a person who was tough on the outside, but alone reveals his public toughness as a stoic shell masking internal turmoil. The stoic protagonist plagued by inner demons strikes a chord with many readers, and is still popular today, as seen in the novels of James Lee Burke, T. Jefferson Parker, and Ian Rankin.

The established hardboiled style was terse and stripped to the bone. Chandler introduced a lyrical style that was contrary to the status quo. He allowed Marlowe the chance to lift his eyes from the plot and gaze around him at the city of Los Angeles, and the mood and atmosphere of the city casts a magical spell in Chandler's books.

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Whereas hardboiled is tough and colloquial, noir fiction is identified by a carefully nurtured atmosphere of fear, sweat, and desperation, with the main character often meeting death or defeat in the end. This, of course, is nothing new in literature. Dark moods and doomed heros have been around since the dawn of literature. Noir shows influences from the melodramatic Gothic writers, the Greek tragedy dramatists, back to the origins of literature with Beowulf and Gilgamesh. Viewed in a more contemporary light, noir is a crime-oriented return to the pessimistic determinism of the American Naturalists, such as Stephen Crane's cruel Maggie: A Girl Of The Streets and Jack London's Sea Wolf. Because hardboiled deals more with attitude and noir with atmosphere, the two genres are not mutually exclusive, and fiction may be both hardboiled and noir.

Early hardboiled almost invariably had a tough good guy hero who struggled and prevailed in a harsh and cruel world. Towards the end of the violent and crime-ridden 1920s William Burnett wrote a different kind of hardboiled novel called Little Caesar. It remained tough and colloquial, but instead of the proverbial knight in tarnished armor, the protagonist was a slimy, doomed gangster named Rico.

More criminal protagonists followed with Armitage Trail's Scarface in 1930, Faulkner's Sanctuary in 1931, and Paul Cain's Fast One in 1932. This early American crime fiction is the vehicle through which noir evolved. Although crime remained a strong theme, the primary theme gradually shifted towards the trademark doom and gloom atmosphere of noir.

James Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) is often heralded as the founding cornerstone of noir. It features an oft-repeated plot involving a man drawn to crime by a sexually charged and desirable woman, and a desperate struggle to avoid the consequences of his crime. The mood of alienation, moral ambiguity, desperation, and paranoia set the stage for a genre that has run strong for over 60 years. Horace McCoy's landmark They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Edward Anderson's Thieves Like Us, and James Cain's Double Indemnity came out in the 1930s. The 1940s saw Cornell Woolrich's I Married A Dead Man, Patricia Highsmith's Stranger On A Train, William Lindsay Gresham's Nightmare Alley, and Geoffrey Homes's classic Build My Gallows High. David Goodis, Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, Charles Williams, and a host of others have kept the genre alive. James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia qualifies as a contemporary noir classic.

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The Industrial Revolution began almost exclusively in Britain, and from 1760 to 1830 was largely confined there. Population drifted towards the large cities and big factories. The worker lost his autonomy and became a powerless cog in a monstrous laissez-faire machine. Karl Marx recognized the danger of unrestrained capitalism and wrote the Communist Manifesto (1848), followed by Das Kapital, which came out piecemeal between 1867 and 1894. Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854) whispered of the worker's plight amidst the smokestacks of London.

The growth of industry progressed slower in the United States, but by the beginning of the twentieth century it had evoked significant changes. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle documented the horrible working conditions of the Chicago meatpackers, with a long Socialistic rant at the end. Lenin pioneered a Marxist government in Russia in 1918, and the States were torn by labor strikes and violence through most of the 1920s. In January of 1920, the New York Times reported over 3,000 suspected Socialist radicals arrested. Later in the year five members of the New York state legislature were expelled for belonging to the Socialist Party, and suspected radicals Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested for murdering a paymaster guard. Eugene Debs was nominated by the Socialist Party for president, and he ran his campaign from jail. Socialism had become a highly visible and significant issue in the U.S. Red became both a dangerous and a fashionable color. The literati fell in love with the worker and the Proletariat novel took a turn towards the hardboiled.

John Dos Passos's 42nd Parallel (1930) is the first hardboiled Proletariat novel, followed closely by 1919 and, completing his USA trilogy, The Big Money. John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle (1936), about a an agricultural strike and some Marxist labor organizers, and The Grapes Of Wrath (1939), the disheartening story about an Oklahoma family trying to survive as farm laborers in California, fully embraced the Proletarian spirit. Ernest Hemingway's To Have And Have Not (1937) has been labeled Proletariat, but a careful reading shows a cautious skepticism of the Socialist movement. Hemingway explores the conflicts between Harry Morgan's hardboiled independence and the need to band together as a theme, with Harry finally realizing the futility of his way of life. Half-crazed from the pain of a bullet wound in the stomach, Harry stutters and stammers and finally spits out his hard-earned lesson, "No matter how a man alone ain't got no bloody fucking chance." Workers unite.

Dos Passos and Steinbeck succeeded with the Proletarian element because they concentrated on the worker. As the characters and plots strayed deeper into crime and the noir genre, the tie-in to Socialism became less convincing. In Edward Anderson's classic Thieves Like Us (1937), it's difficult to see the Marxist rhetoric as anything more than an unconvincing excuse for robbing banks. But the Socialist theme was popular, and it continued to pop up, even in the most unlikely places. In Gresham's spectacular Nightmare Alley, Stanley Carlisle meets a labor activist on a freight train, and the reader endures an irrelevant rant about the rights of the worker. His pronouncement, "You can't get nothing in this world by yourself," is surprisingly similar to Harry Morgan's in To Have And Have Not. The main theme of noir is inevitable doom. The Socialist cant of salvation through unity, except where it is presented as obviously absurd, subverts the noir theme and weakens the novels' impact.

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Openly loathing any association with the genre, Horace McCoy wrote the first hardboiled Hollywood novel, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, in 1935. The hardboiled nature of the novel involves the unsentimental and unflinching attitude of the prose more than the toughness of the characters, and there is a sad sense of doom and hopelessness that permeates the book which ties it strongly to noir. McCoy's book was followed by Richard Hallas's You Play The Black And The Red Comes Up in 1938, and Nathanael West's Day Of The Locust in 1939.

These Hollywood novels have more in common than a Los Angeles setting and characters in the movie industry. Hollywood is a symbol of the distillation of the American dream into the base element of greed, and the rejection of morality in pursuit of the fame and fortune is a prominent theme. Avarice is the standard, and the obsession with money reveals shallow people and empty lives. West describes Faye Greener, a starlet looking for advancement:

"...she refused his friendship, or, rather, insisted on keeping it impersonal. She had told him why. He had nothing to offer her, neither money nor looks, and she could only love a handsome man and would only let a wealthy man love her... She wasn't hardboiled. It was just that she put love on a special plane, which a man without money or looks couldn't move."

Another common characteristic of the Hollywood genre is a group insanity or stupidity that blankets the general population, and the masses are often shown as vacuous and unthinking herd animals. This is demonstated in the riot scene that ends West's Day Of The Locust and the ridiculous faith in an absurd economic plan in You Play The Black And The Red Comes Up. Genter, in Hallas's novel, states his theory:

"'It's the climate - something in the air. You can bring men from other parts of the world who are sane. And you know what happens? At the very moment they cross those mountains,' he whispered real soft, 'they go mad. Instantaneously and automatically, at the very moment they cross the mountains into California, they go insane. Everyone does.'"

Besides a crazed citizenry and individuals ruled by greed, the Hollywood sub-genre depicts characters wandering in a slightly surrealistic world. West plays especially well in this arena. Todd Hackett's phantasmagoric odyssey through the movie set, the drunken party after the cockfight, and the riot all serve to underscore this motif. McCoy's use of the dance marathon is simultaneously harshly realistic and nightmarish. The world turns dreamlike for Hallas's protagonist in the final scene when he's riding the rail back home.

The protagonists in these three Hollywood novels struggle to survive, and their toughness is manifested in stoicism more than aggression. Eventually the glamour of Hollywood grew strong enough to attract a few detectives, such as Leslie Bellem's Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective stories, and Raymond Chandler's Marlowe in Little Sister, but these stories share few of the Hollywood characteristics and belong more fittingly in the detective genre. The Hollywood genre continues with Joyce Carol Oates's Blonde, Harold Robbins's The Carpetbaggers, and James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential. The Hollywood paradigm has wandered, and the extent that these remain true to the original genre varies.

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Southern Gothic is noir with a distinct Southern flavor. Reflecting Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness and presenting man with a violent and cruel interior, barely hidden beneath a thin veneer of civilization, Southern Gothic explores two main themes. The first involves an examination of the circumstances that would cause a person to shed this veneer, and the second explores what happens when they do. Frequently divorced from the profit motive, violent crime emanates from the dark Freudian depths of the soul, deeper by far than simple greed. Disassociated from love, twisted sexual appetites abound. Lust is the best that can be hoped for. Rape and perversion become the norm. The genre often features a tortured protagonist on the brink of insanity, colloquial Southern dialogue, racism, dark humor, and grotesque and macabre violence.

William Faulkner's third novel, Sanctuary, published in 1931, is the first bona fide Southern Gothic novel. It is a complex, dark, brooding psychological tale of terror, reminiscent of Poe and Hawthorne, with a strong Freudian undercurrent. The book is set during the Prohibition era, where bad living and bad luck delivers two young people into the hands of a group of bootleggers living in a dilapidated house in the backwoods of Mississippi. In a series of nightmare scenes, the young man breaks free, but Temple, the innocent college-aged daughter of a prominent citizen, witnesses a murder and then faces a horrible fate. Temple is kidnapped and, facing more horrors, undergoes a strange psychological transformation.

Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road came out the year following Faulkner's Sanctuary. Although he is best known for originating the bawdy backwoods style carried on by William Faulkner's brother John and a host of others, Tobacco Road also deserves credit for influencing Southern Gothic. There is a twisted, demented, heart of emptiness that permeates the novel. The book is notable for a lack of premeditated and purposeful crime, but is probably all the more shocking because of that. The Jeeters family is reduced to something subhuman by poverty, laziness, stupidity, and apathy. It displays the major theme of Southern Gothic that the essential soul of man, stripped bare of the thin shell of civilization, is ugly, savage, cruel, and uncaring.

A small but distinguished group of authors have staked a claim in the Southern Gothic camp. The confines of the genre are not highly restrictive, and the authors have taken full advantage of this freedom to explore diverse plots and secondary themes. James Dickey's Deliverance has several characteristics of a quest novel. An adventurous canoe trip deep into Southern wilderness turns ugly. The group discovers that the peaceful resistance of a Gandhi or King only works against a halfway civilized opponent. Against the heart of darkness, violence must be met with violence. The knowledge of their own capacity for ruthless violence is the real reason for their quest, and the realization is their salvation.

Crews's Feast Of Snakes is a Southern twist on John O'Hara's theme in Appointment In Samarra. A character chafes from the harness of a restrictive, hypocritical, cruel society, and conflicting desires to both embrace and reject this society and reject it leads to an unhealthy ending. Cormac McCarthy's Child Of God is a moving portrayal of a lonely man who slips into depraved madness in the hills of eastern Tennessee. Flannery O'Connor invokes a religious theme of sin and salvation in Wise Blood. Presently Daniel Woodrell is perhaps the best writer active in the genre. His Give Us A Kiss is aptly subtitled A Country Noir. He writes smooth lyric prose with a wicked sense of humor and irony.

There are several other notable authors that have graced the genre. Although best known for his journalistic endeavor, In Cold Blood, Truman Capote started out in Southern Gothic. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) followed a boy's search for his father in a cruel and profane Southern world. Best noted for his plays, Tennessee Williams has several stories which are Southern Gothic, and Carson McCullers's The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter (1940) and Reflections In A Golden Eye (1941) show influences of the genre.

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Hardboiled passed through literature like a shockwave from an earthquake. From the highly localized phenomena of the 1920s, confined to the pages of pulp magazines and shunned by the literati, hardboiled became a major literary force in the 1930s, producing literature judged by a major publisher to be among the world's best. The decade started with Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and ended with Chandler's The Big Sleep, two of the most influential and well-known hardboiled masterpieces ever written. Literary greats Faulkner and Hemingway emulated and embellished the style. Although the 1930s provided some of the most exciting innovations, the genre continues in popularity eighty years after its beginning.

Copyright© 2003 Michael Robison

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MICHAEL ROBISON is an electronics engineer for the U.S. Navy. He lives in southern Indiana with his wife and teenage daughter. They spend summers boating on Lake Monroe.