To move from Noir SF (sorry but the term "Sci-fi" is
considered by some to be a pejorative) to Hardboiled SF, one
novel that comes to mind is POLICE YOUR PLANET. I do love
that title and it fits a Spillane-like style and pace. It is
by Lester Del Ray but was first published in 1953 in magazine
and then in 1956 in book form as by Erik van Lhin. Del Ray
later revised it in 1975 and it was published as by Lester
Del Ray and Erik van Lhin--a collaboration with
himself.
One other suggestion, perhaps out of left field, are some of
the stories by Leigh Brackett from the pulps of the 1940s.
Brackett was a great admirer of Chandler and herself wrote a
hardboiled detective novel so good that Howard Hawks hired
her to work with Faulkner on the adaptation of THE BIG SLEEP.
Something of Chandler's stayed with her in her science
fantasy stories. Chandler and Brackett were both romantics
and favored the lone hero on a difficult quest.
As I was thinking about this I pulled down a Brackett
collection to read the introduction by Michael Moorcock and
found it very insightful. "She took as much from the likes of
James M. Cain, who came from Maryland to use the sharp street
language of Southern California as his inspiration, as she
did from (Edgar Rice) Burroughs. She antedated cyberpunk by
some fifty years, by bringing the spare, laconic prose and
psychically wounded heros of Hemingway, Hammett and Chandler
into the sf pulp...It was why she could move so easily
between private eyes with a nasty past, star-weary spacers
and moody cactus-cussers. And, of course, her lone outlaws,
living on the edge of the civilised world, frequently
commissioned to dare the unknown, are not a million miles
from Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo..."
Brackett's brooding loner hero is exemplified in her stories
of Eric John Stark. She wrote in a sub-form sometimes called
science fantasy as it has elements of both SF and fantasy. In
clumsy hands this can turn into a silly, juvenile mess but
Brackett was a master and her best stories are
transporting.
Richard Moore
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