Ed Gorman - Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories

All these individuals have, in one way or another, to a greater or a lesser extent, aided in the putting together of this volume. To them all, the editors extend heartfelt thanks: Bob Adey, Connie Aitcheson, Mike Ashley, the staff of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England (in particular, Richard Bell, Head of Reader Services, and his deputy Alison Northover, Christine Mason, Jackie Dean, Rosemary McCarthy, and John Slatter of the Nuneham Courtney out-station), John Clute, Richard Coombs, Alastair Durie, Liza Ewell of Oxford University Press, Ed Gorman, Douglas Green, Martin H. Greenberg, E. R. Hagemann (who probably knows more about Black Mask, its contributors, and the hard-boiled movement in general than any other critic), Stephen Leadbeatter, Marcia Muller, Kim Newman, William F. Nolan, David Pringle, Roger Robinson, the late and much lamented Robert Sampson, Andy Sawyer, John F. Suter, Peter Tyas, and Gene Zombolas.

During the course of preparing this volume, Jack Adrian suffered a near-fatal heart attack, which added more than somewhat to the projects timeline. He would like to acknowledge a debt of unusual gratitude to Oxford University Presss Linda Morse and Liza Ewell for their lasting enthusiasm and enormous patience during trying times.

Not easily. The very label hard-boiled makes it difficult, if not impossible, to come up with a precise and concise formulation. The term has been used and misused by readers, writers, and critics so often that, as with most literary labels, it has become virtually meaningless.

A more worthwhile approach is to list some of the elements contained in commendable crime stories of this type. These elements are not the only ones, to be sure; but for us they are the most vital. The more of them that an author incorporates into a particular work, the greater the works merit.

The hard-boiled crime story deals with disorder, disaffection, and dissatisfaction. Throughout the genres seventy-year history, this has remained a constant and central tenet. The typical hard-boiled character (if not the typical hard-boiled writer) has a jaundiced view of government, power, and the law. He (or, sometimes, she) is often a loner, a social misfit. If he is on the side of the angels, he is likely to be a cynical idealist: he believes that society is corrupt, but he also believes in justice and will make it his business to do whatever is necessary to see that justice is done. If he walks the other side of the mean streets, he walks them at night; he is likely a predator, and as morally bankrupt as any human being can be. In the noir world, extremes are the norm; clashes between good and evil are never petty, and good does not always triumph, nor is justice always done.

A hard-boiled story must emphasize character and the problems inherent in human behavior. Character conflict is essential; the crime or threat of crime with which the story is concerned is of secondary importance.

It must be reflective of the times in which it was written, providing an accurate, honest, and realistic depiction of its locale (whether urban, suburban, or rural) and of the individuals who inhabit that locale. Even more important, it must offer some insight into the social, political, and/or moral climate of its era. It must, as critic David Madden has written, reflect [its] world in a way that is at once an objective description and an implicit judgment of it. Entertainment alone is not a sufficient raison dtre.

Even though it involves some type of violent crime, a hard-boiled crime story must not use unmotivated violence or violence for the sake of sensationalism: The mere threat of brute force is often sufficient.

It must have, in Benjamin Appels phrase, living people talking a living language, however harsh, cruel, or obscene these people and that language may be.

It should generate, as much as possible, what Raymond Chandler called a smell of fear.

The presence of these various elements was one of three criteria we used in selecting stories for Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories. The second criterion was a given storys familiarity and accessibility to todays readers. Many hard-boiled tales have been anthologized in recent years; some, such as Chandlers Red Wind, have been overanthologized. Wherever possible, therefore, we chose stories that either have never before appeared in an anthology or at least have not been reprinted too recently. In a few instances, where the work of such icons as Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross Macdonald is limited in quantity, and either still in print or at any rate easily obtainable in other sources, we chose representative stories that, in our opinion, have had the least amount of exposure.

The third criterion was the authors themselves. While we considered it necessary indeed, crucial to include a wide range of the forms major practitioners, at the same time we grew aware, as we researched various magazine and book sources, of how much excellent neglected fiction they contain by writers not known to us (such as William Cole and James Hannah). As a result, in preparing the final table of contents, we decided that although preference should be given to those individuals whose body of work has defined, shaped, and influenced American hard-boiled crime writing over the past seven decades, it was imperative to include stories by lesser-known authors.

We run the risk as all anthologists do of excluding favorite stories or favorite authors. Our choices will certainly not please all readers; we would be amazed if they did. Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that some writers were omitted because of space limitations, while other notables in the hard-boiled tradition were left out simply because they produced no short pieces worthy of the distinction, or they wrote short stories that in our estimation do not have the quality of their longer works.

Although the hard-boiled story as we know it today was born in the 1920s, hard-boiled writing did not spring fully fledged from that antisocial maelstrom of the years between the two world wars. It was a mlange of different styles and different genres, and its heroic figures can be traced back a hundred years earlier, to both the myth and the reality of the western frontier. The history of the United States abounds with larger-than-life loners whose accomplishments, whose very survival, depended on an uncompromising toughness and a willingness to enter into struggles against seemingly insurmountable odds: Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Davy Crockett, Jim Bridger, Mike Fink, Jim Bowie. Such rugged individualists inspired the creation of mythical heroes Paul Bunyan, for instance and of fictional men of action. Both James Fenimore Coopers Natty Bumppo and Herman Melvilles Captain Ahab are hunters driven by forces outside themselves, and in that sense are perfect paradigms of the modern private eye. Even Mark Twains Huck Finn, and certainly Jack Londons Wolf Larsen, have elements of the hard-boiled knight in their makeup.

Similarly, American history is filled with scoundrels and outlaws; persons motivated by greed, lust, and power; persons who hold human values and human life in little regard: William Bonney, John Wesley Hardin, Belle Starr, Herman W. Mudgett, and all the little-known and long-forgotten grifters, gamblers, confidence swindlers, whores, thieves, and paid assassins who inhabited the towns and cities, followed the railroads westward, and flocked to the gold-mining camps. These figures likewise inspired nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors, among them Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Frank R. Stockton, Upton Sinclair, and O. Henry. They, too, are the antecedents of the individuals who live in the pages of the modern noir story.