Lonestar Bill sent in John Wooley's take on the term
"hard-boiled"
(who, it turns out, isn't the same Fr. John Wooley who
sometimes shows up here):
>"Dan Turner's tales are shining examples of the kind
of fiction called
>'hard-boiled.' The term has been bandied about a lot
in recent years, but
>basically it refers to that style nurtured by Captain
Joseph T. Shaw in his
>Black Mask detective pulp, popularized by such fine
detective writers as
>Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and continues
to the present day in
>the works of scribes like Mickey Spillane, Ross
Macdonald and Joe Gores.
>Hard-boiled heroes talk tough. They crack wise. They
shoot, and are shot
>at; beat, and are beaten. They are frequently ladies'
men, and are almost
>always borderline alcoholics. Most of the time, they
wage one-man
>campaigns-quests, really-for justice and
righteousness and fair play, the
>way they see it, although they are not above bending
the law to suit their
>own purposes. They have been called existential,
these men who, immersed to
>the neck in a callous, superficial world without
rules, make their own and
>stick to them. Imagine Bogart in The Big Sleep or To
Have and Have Not, and
>you'll have a pretty good idea of the mythos at work
here."
Not bad, if a little dated (Spillane and Macdonald aren't
exactly cranking 'em out, are they?) But Wooley gets caught
up in surface details. Certainly, it's hard to see Archer as
a ladies' man, for example, or Spade, the Op, or most of
Gores' DKA guys as borderline alcoholics. There are plenty of
ways to be hard-boiled that have nothing to do with sex or
alcohol. It's the core of the characters that makes them
hard-boiled or not, not their personal lives, fedoras or
trenchcoats.
Kevin Burton Smith The Thrilling Detective Web Site http://www.colba.net/~kvnsmith/thrillingdetective/
New fiction from Anthony Neil Smith and Jochem Vandersteen, a
Reader's Survey and Talkin' 'Bout Shaft. Can you dig
it?
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