A Not So Cosy Mystery: A Brief Overview of Hard-Boiled and Noir Fiction Part One

The articles in this series were originally written for and posted at Literary Exploration.

There are literally dozens of great authors and great novels that could have been suggested as essential reading for this guide. The writer of the article went through agonising decisions over who to leave out and is more than aware that your favourite author probably hasn’t been mentioned but feel free to start a discussion in the comments. 

A (not-so) Brief Overview of Hard-boiled and Noir Fiction

Part One - A Not So Cosy Mystery (1930s and 1940s)

In 1887 Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes and the success of his great detective spawned an entire genre of detective fiction that imitates to some degree or another to this date. The light-hearted and relatively straightforward approach towards solving crime reached its pinnacle in what has become known as The Golden Age of crime fiction, the 1920s and 1930s. The large majority of the authors writing in this popular style of fiction were British and this was reflected in the settings and general sense of manners contained within.

The inter-war years were a difficult time both socially and politically and this change in society saw crime fiction edge towards what was a more realistic, and more depressing tone with content that would almost certainly shock the characters found within an Agatha Christie novel. The pioneers for this movement towards realism were, perhaps unsurprisingly, Americans and this style became known as hard-boiled.

Taking its name from the style of preparing eggs that leaves the hard shell intact and the yolk fully solidified, the protagonists of hard-boiled fiction are tough skinned, street wise, sharp tongued and ready to solve a mystery with violence if necessary (and it almost always is.)

These are cops, private detectives, ordinary citizens coming up against prohibition gangsters, organised crime, crooked cops, and looking to stand up for what is morally correct. One lone man against an entire system; grown cynical and expecting the worst of people but hoping for the best, he’s the kind of guy who’s seen every horror and will surely see worse before he solves this case.
Hard-boiled is a naturalistic style of writing combined with a cynical, world-weary attitude. This evolved in to Noir fiction, a genre that is if anything even darker; it’s protagonists are usually morally suspect at best and at worst are degenerates, psychopaths and cold blooded murderers.

The most succinct and accurate definition of the difference between the two styles is this:

Noir is the world. Hard-boiled is the character. You can have Noir without the Hard-boiled, but not the other way around.

Carroll John Daly is credited with creating the first hard-boiled story for Black Mask magazine in the 1920s and his first hard-boiled novel Snarl of the Beast (1927) marks the first of, what I shall deem, the essentials of the genre. At the time Daly was the most popular author of the genre he essentially started but he has since been unfairly labelled a hack (the writers opinion only) for simply not being of the same quality as the famous authors he inspired.

Hot on the heels of Daly was Dashiell Hammett, the former Pinkerton operative turned author, who between 1929 and 1934 published the only novels he ever wrote. At least two of which are widely considered masterpieces of the genre. Red Harvest (1929) featuring the unnamed detective known as The Continental Op and perhaps his most famous work The Maltese Falcon (1930); it’s PI Sam Spade is credited as being the archetype that all other hard-boiled detectives are based on, with his personal detachment from the case and unflinching devotion to ensuring justice his strongest characteristics.

The man who would follow in his footsteps, Raymond Chandler, said of him:

“Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse...He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.”

A more obscure name with an essential of the genre crops up next, Raoul Whitfield; his debut novel Green Ice (1930) was described by Dashiell Hammett as “280 pages of naked action pounded into tough compactness by staccato, hammerlike writing” but he never seemed to live up to his early success and retired from writing fiction only a few years later.

There are three names that everybody mentions when discussing this period of early hard-boiled American fiction. Hammett is the first, his Maltese Falcon regularly winning polls for best hard-boiled novel also, but to his name you will also find added the words Chandler and Cain.

Raymond Chandler decided to try his hand at writing after losing his job during the Depression and in the process seemed to capture America the way that America wants to be remembered. His hero is Philip Marlowe, his beat is L.A., a brave warrior in the Sam Spade mould but with a softer underbelly. In his classic debut The Big Sleep (1939) we find a PI who likes to drink, is handy in a fight and cynically wisecracks his way through most situations but this is also a man who plays chess, reads poetry and has philosophical questions playing on his mind. The generally acknowledge highpoint in Chandler’s (and Marlowe’s) career would come later with The Long Goodbye (1953) and demonstrates the literary nature of the genre, author and character.

James M. Cain on the other hand was largely active in the noir category; in his major works his characters were not detectives but men corrupted by sex and money. Double Indemnity (1943) is the story of an insurance agent who plots against his employers to get a woman and some money. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) features a mixture of sexuality and violence in a love triangle situation.

With the big names out of the way I will share two more important figures in the formative years of this genre that are a lot harder to find and therefore more obscure.

Cornell Woolrich, who also wrote with some success under the pseudonym William Irish, is virtually out of print today but his importance on the development of the genre remains. His work more often that not evoked despair and cynicism in the everyday life scenarios and as was the case with the bleaker examples of the genre was more popular in France than America. If you can find them, I recommend The Bride Wore Black (1940) and The Black Angel (1943) as good starting points.

Dorothy B. Hughes is another essential early noir author that few people have heard of. Her In A Lonely Place (1947) has recently been republished as a Penguin Modern Classic and quite rightly so, is a fine example of her tightly plotted and tense approach towards noir and features a truly heinous protagonist in Dix Steele. Amongst her other work The Blackbirder (1943) is a story of fear, paranoia and dread.

In Part Two I’ll be taking a look at the second generation of authors who worked during the boom in paperback fiction of the 1950s.

You can find me discussing books on Goodreads, discussing movies on Letterboxd, tweeting nonsense as blahblahblahtoby  feel free to say hi.

Noir-a-Thon: The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Again I'd like to apologise for the awful spam from my attempts to publish yesterdays post. Please enjoy a spam free noir review.

And so it begins. The classic period of the film noir style is opened in style by Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. If you want to catch up with the archive it's to be found here.

Director: John Huston
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre
Year: 1941
Country of origin: USA
Language: English

Synopsis: Sam Spade's partner is killed whilst on a job for a mysterious female client, Miss Wonderly. Spade investigates the murder and gets drawn in to a search for the Maltese Falcon, a valuable figurine, pitting his wits against the effeminate Joel Cairo, the threatening and devious Gutman and ineffectual punk Wilmer.


What Indie Nights? review
Hello as usual, bbbg-readers, Leah here. You know. What Indie Nights? That's me.

What a week we've had here at Noir HQ, such a week that Toby managed to get his review written last Wednesday and here I sit, Monday afternoon, frantically trying to put the Maltese Falcon into words…

At last, here we are, at the very beginning of the Classic Noir period! It's The Maltese Falcon, guys! The one! The noir! The film that started it all!

I hope that with our last four reviews we've given you all some grounding in noir history, enough for you to question that statement and delve a little deeper into what people mean when they say this. Because, boy oh boy, is The Maltese Falcon is in a different class altogether than any of our proto-noirs. In some ways it's a huge leap forward, mood-wise, setting-wise, and in others almost a step backwards: when I think of the subtleties and nuances of Pépé le Moko, for instance, this shrinks into the corner like a lying dame. For the first thing, it was a direct adaptation of a novel often said to be the last word in hard-boiled detective fiction, which is kind of cheating (if you look at it one way), and kind of the point (if you look at it the other way…). For the second thing, it's very, very American, in a way that the others obviously haven't been, and this sudden change in setting and pace jars a bit in comparison to its Continental forebears.



But, of course, there is a reason this is cited as one of the, if not the first noir. It's because it is, of course! Convolutions and one-dimensions aside (and there are a lot, believe you me), you won't find a more noirish noir this side of 1940s Los Angeles (although, shhh, it was set in San Francisco. We don't talk about that).

The Maltese Falcon has mood, it has noir and atmosphere, in spades. It has so much atmosphere you're slapped in the face with it all, you practically walk into a solid wall of Darkness and Underworld and Wavering Morals. It was so in-your-face with its noiricity that for a while I struggled to know what to say - what is there to say about the quintessential noir? All the trademarks are there - Sam Spade is the hardboiled private detective, not quite on anyone's side but his own. Brigid O'Shaughnessy is the femme fatale, leading all the men on in her own dangerous game, lying and cheating every step of the way. The cops growl and threaten and bumble uselessly, the bad bad guys smile and sneer and pull guns on you and knock you out with drugs in your whisky and hate the stinkin' sight of you. Venetian blinds cast stark shadows across faces, dark alleyways and gaudy neon lights abound. Everyone stays in until night, chases everyone else around dark streets at ungodly hours, and stays up till dawn drinking gin and smoking like chimneys and not trusting anyone. Throw all that into a pot and tell me you don't get a delicious noir stew.



I recently finished reading the book, which may explain why I 'got' a lot more of it this time round - the first time I watched I remember just surrendering myself to the mood, because trying to understand what's going on between all the people and their intrigues and their murky pasts is not a feat most human minds are up to.

It's certainly testament to the mood of noir that having literally no idea how the conclusion was reached made no-never-mind to how much I enjoyed the journey there.

As usual, hop on over to my blog for a companion post, and thanks for having me!

Blahblahblahtoby review
It's well documented that I love this movie, I included it in both of the recent GoSeeTalk blogathons, Cool Off With The Classics and Double Feature after all. I'm not blind to its faults, I just love all of the great aspects that it overshadows the bad. I shall try to be impartial however.



Based on the classic pulp novel by Dashiell Hammett, John Huston helped to create the noir private eye hero that would go on to be the basis for dozens of the type over the next 17 years. Bogart's Spade is a quick thinking, fast talking, self serving gumshoe and it is largely due to his skilled performance that this movie is as enjoyable as it is. But then all of the performances are suberb as some fine actors make the best of some pretty one dimensional characters. If Bogie has only got room to merely hint at the fact that he is upset over the denouement, to show the tiniest fraction of a man in turmoil, then Lorre and Greenstreet have even less to work with.

The two of them are not given much screentime but the hints at a past relationship, unacceptable to show in a Hollywood film of the period, are woven in to their performances. Lorre is almost unrecognisable from the snivelling child killer from Fritz Lang's M, having lost a lot of weight and almost in 'black face' from being so overly made up to look African. Sydney Greenstreet is done a great disservice by being made to look almost comical at times due to his girth, Huston shooting from below the waist making him look like Humpty Dumpty but when allowed to act he is wonderfully powerful and deceptively eccentric.

I don't recall ever seeing Mary Astor in anything else, she reminds me of Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter in terms of her looks, but she gives a good performance as the lying, manipulative angel faced femme fatale. They're all superficial charicatures of one kind or another but it's that kind of movie.



Through these caricatures Huston's noir paints a picture of a bloated humanity, only looking out for itself; if later noirs became known for the poetic idea of a man lost to fate but fighting every battle to the last (see Pepe Le Moko last week) then this is more a noir filled with hard-nosed cynicism.

And Spade is the chief cynic, he knows he's not an angel and he expects nothing more from those around him but he is also conflicted; sleeping with his partner's wife yet he feels he must do something about his murder for example. This conflict between knowing what the right thing to do is and the way of the world he inhabits isn't thoroughly explored and is only touched on explicitly at the end but by watching Bogie throughout you pick up on the small changes in his facial expressions as he says and does one thing because he feels he has to yet clearly does not want to.

Going back to the criteria, we now ask how is this a noir? Huston definitely uses the film as Social Criticism with his cynical look at humanity, Gangsters and Private Eyes are major characters, Sexual Pathology and Murder Taken Lightly (middle class murder) throughout and I invite you to see this movie then go back and read Eberts 10 Identifiers before telling me that he didn't write them about this film.

Brian had such a blast last time that he's back again, munching on the corn I freshly popped for the evening.

Guest Review
Hello all, this is Brian Vs. Movies, weighing in on The Maltese Falcon --- the film that launched a genre. While you can make good arguments that there were films with noir elements before this one, The Maltese Falcon was definitely the first major film noir and has deservedly become the prototype that all other noirs model themselves after. What makes this movie stand so tall?



For starters, the script is great. This isn't the first film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's ridiculously awesome novel (or even the second), but it's the first to stay true to the tone of the hard-boiled source material. Of course, the Hays Code prevented the filmmakers from including references to sex or sexuality, but that is about all that changed from the book to the screen; there is a remarkable amount of dialogue taken directly from the novel, and that dialogue is what really makes this film click.

This was John Huston's debut as a director, but this is one of the most mature filmmaking debuts in history. The cinematography from Arthur Edeson would have been beautiful without Huston's directorial intent, but the result of them working together is a treat for any cinephile. There are scenes with exaggerated camera angles (primarily those featuring Greenstreet) and interesting lighting effects (nearly every shot of Astor), but more importantly, they all have subtle meaning.



As good as the script and direction are, the acting is what makes this one for the ages. The supporting cast is wonderful, but Humphrey Bogart is the reason to watch The Maltese Falcon. Spade is smart, tough, witty, funny, and almost a sucker for love. I would still love this movie if it was just Bogart delivering a monologue. He's just so damn cool!

I will admit that the plot is not revolutionary and that some small parts of the film might seem a little campy by modern standards. That does nothing to dilute the effect of this film. This isn't just a great noir, it's a giant of cinema and without a doubt, The Maltese Falcon is my very favorite film.

First noir down, I know a lot you will have seen this one so feel free to share your views in the blahs below and any links to reviews you might already have are most welcome.

Coming Attractions!