Susanna Lee - Detectives in the Shadows: A Hard-Boiled History

For nearly a century, the trench coatwearing detective smoking a cigarette on a rainy street has been an American icon. Although not always garnering critical recognition or esteem, stories of the hard-boiled detective sold. From Prohibition to the stock market crash of 1929, from the Great Depression to the start of the Second World War, from the postwar threat of communism to the explosion of rock and roll, from the fall of Nixon to the consumerism of the 1980s, and from the national security concerns of the early 2000s to the election of 2016, hard-boiled detectives have persisted through some of the United States most fraught historical moments. For every tough season in American history, there is a detective who emerged to handle it. And while all crime fiction portrays a wealth of heroes for readers and viewers to enjoy, those of the hard-boiled tradition resonate with Americans on a particular level, the iconic image persisting from the pages of books to the screen. The hard-boiled narrative serves as a dark mirror for Americas worst impulses, while also offering a nuanced portrait of response and morality that actual history frequently fails to bear out. The hard-boiled detective is a sort of honorary shadow figure in US history. He emerges in the 1920s and 1930s with Carroll John Dalys Race Williams, Dashiell Hammetts Continental Op, and Raymond Chandlers Philip Marlowe. In the next two decades, he resurfaces as Mickey Spillanes Mike Hammer. By the 1970s, the hard-boiled detective is Robert Parkers Spenser and televisions Jim Rockford and Harry O. And in the early 2000s, a contemporary reincarnation of the hard-boiled appears in the form of The Wires Jimmy McNulty, True Detectives Rustin Cohle, and Jessica Joness titular character.

But the American hard-boiled hardly invented detective fiction. Edgar Allan Poes Murders in the Rue Morgue, published in 1841, is generally recognized as the first modern detective story. For decades after, the term detective meant the sort of armchair sleuth embodied by Sir Arthur Conan Doyles Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christies Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Still, about the same time that Poe created Auguste Dupin, James Fenimore Cooper and John Pendleton Kennedy conceived their frontier protagonists. Coopers Leatherstocking (182341) and Kennedys Horse-Shoe Robinson (1835) are models of the modern American hero. Later in the nineteenth century, western sheriffs like Pat Garrett and Wyatt Earp would capture the popular imagination. When Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett wrote for the pulp magazine Black Mask in the early 1920s, it was as if Leatherstocking, Dupin, and the lawmen of the Old West had joined forces to create a new, modern species. The hard-boiled breed had the canny sense of observation and quick mind of Dupin and Holmes and the plainspoken toughness of the American frontier hero. The resulting hybrid of those earlier character types was fantastically popular. First appearing in short stories in pulp magazines then in novels, the hard-boiled protagonist expanded into films and television programs. However reincarnated, the hard-boiled stood up for the nation and stood in for its people in a peculiarly American way.

The term hard-boiled first described human character in the late nineteenth century. A 1927 issue of American Speech recounts that the word egg [from hard-boiled eggs] was dropped and men became merely hard boiledand the term reverted to the old meaning as it was among the yeggs: hard, shrewd, keen men who neither asked nor expected sympathy nor gave any, who could not be imposed upon. Several early uses of the word, however, had an unmistakably negative connotation. In 1897, an item in Salems Daily Capital Journal upbraided a politician: Senator Mitchell, now honestly, dont you think it takes the barefaced impudence of a hard-boiled criminal to keep up such a proceeding? Then in 1919, a brutal former army lieutenant in charge of a French detention farm earned the nickname of Lieutenant Hardboiled Smith. According to survivors reports, Smith would ask his prisoners if they were hard-boiled and then torment them no matter what their response. The name derived from what he said to prisoners rather than from what he did, yet when he was tried for his crimes and jailed, Hardboiled Smith went down in history as a sadist to be feared.