Marianne,
Re your question below:
> . . . I keep asking myself, reading this
> discussion, whether it's
> POSSIBLE to have hard-boiled without
having
> previously had (1) cowboy and
> (2) Hemingway?
Partly, I think the HB tradition grows out of the frontier
tradition of rugged individualism (though not necessarily
from the cowboy, notwithstanding the fact that Charlie
Siringo, one of the first PIs to become a writer styled
himself the "Cowboy Detective").
An even greater influence was the confluence of events in the
late teens and early '20s, specifically from the cynicism
following WW1 and the adoption of Prohibition. In fact the
word "hard-boiled" was first used to describe the tough,
colloquial professional non-coms who were suddenly assigned
the Herculean task of turning thousands of civilians into
citizen-soldiers in a short period of time.
The influence of WW1 on Hemingway is well-known, but had
Hemingway never existed, I think there still would have been
HB crime fiction. Hammett and Daly, after all, were virtual
contemporaries of Hemingway, and developed independently from
Hemingway.
JIM DOHERTY
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