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Abstract: Hard-boiled is not only a literary subgenre of crime fiction, but also an expression of a typical American aesthetic. Its characters and repertoire have almost nothing in common with the European tradition concerning the rationalistic detective. One should understand hard-boiled fiction as part of the legacy of American modernist novel. Although the rules of the genre might seem rather traditionalistic, hard-boiled fiction has never been out of fashion since its Golden Age, because various writers from different places in the US have used it as a means to attune their style to urgent moral issues at a certain time.
Keywords: detective fiction, hard-boiled, metropolis, modernism, postmodernism, violence
1.Introduction: The first class of American detectives
The hard-boiled genre has always been underrated as escapist and it is indeed to a high degree, although it might be useful to ponder a little bit on Raymond Chandler's observation in "The Simple Art of Murder" (Chandler 1977: 232) that "All reading for pleasure is escape..." One knows the traditional repertoire: fedoras and trench coats, the femme fatale, the lights of cars probing the rainy nights, tires screeching on asphalt, the red tips of cigarettes glowing in the dark, narrow alleys where anything can happen, the mansions of the rich with a dubious past, the heist gone wrong, the landlady or the landlord ready to turn in the lodgers in exchange for a generous tip, the hateful hoodlum descending from a black sedan, the political crook and his unstable offspring, corrupted cops who hope for the detective's immediate undoing. Why should all these be looked down on as easy gain? Perhaps the reputation of hard-boiled fiction owes much to its blooming in the pulp magazines during the era of the sophisticated modernist novel. Hard-boiled seems to be a sum of conventions and clichés, although it is precisely apparent strict rules that ensure literary flexibility. Whereas European detective fiction gratifies the reader with elaborate patterns, clues intellectually chosen and the whole "whodunit" paraphernalia, the hard-boiled literature is not mainly about the case. It is not always about detectives either. It conjures up a morally charged atmosphere and a particular American aesthetic. Praising the detective story in a 70s lecture, Jorge Luis Borges (1999: 499) deplored the contemporary American genre...