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RARA-AVIS: Definition from Encyclopedia of Hard-Boiled
After mulling over the discussion about trying to define hard-boiled,
I thought I'd check with a library reference book and see what it said.
It does not contain the term noir, however.
>From BENET'S READERS ENCYCYLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LITERATURE (HarperCollins,
1991), edited by George Perkins, Barbara Perkins, and Phillip Leininger:
"hard-boiled fiction.
A type of detective or crime story in which an air of realism is
generated through laconic and often vulgar dialogue, depiction of
cruelty and bloodshed at close range, and use of generally
seamy environments. The genre was perhaps a product of the
prohibition era, but it was also a reaction against the attenuated
prettifications of the Conan Doyle school and an attempt to apply
the literary lessons taught by such serious American novelists as
Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. Hard-boiled fiction seems to
have appeared first in a magazine called the BLACK MAST (founded 1919),
and its development was closely associated with the editor, Joseph
T. Shaw. Many critics today feel that the first full-fledged
example of the hard-boiled method was Dashiell Hammett's story "Fly
Paper," which appeared in August 1929 in BLACK MAST. In 1946 Shaw
compiled THE HARD-BOILED OMNIBUS: EARLY STORIES FROM BLACK MASK,
including stories by Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Raoul Whitfield, and
George Harmon Coxe. To these names should be added W.R. Burnett,
Jonathan Latimer, and Peter Cheyney. Later, hard-boiled fiction
in a particularly violent phase became hugely popular in the Mike
Hammer novels of Mickey Spillane."
This seems to me to be a fairly fitting definition, and mentions
many of the concepts and ideas put forward by members of this list
during the last few weeks.
Has anyone read "Fly Paper?"
of post-war post-war
Best wishes,
Richard King
rking@vunet.vinu.edu
http://rking.vinu.edu
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