Some of my favourite detective fiction is pretty softboiled.
Has anyone read the Boruvka stories of Josef Skvorecky?
Sublime stuff.
(Skvorecky, incidentally, translated Chandler into Czech, so
he knows a thing or two about genre. 'Miss Silver's Past' and
'The Miracle Game', while both very literary works--Nobel
prize-winning territory as far as I'm concerned--are at heart
(or should that be in the stomach?) detective
thrillers.
And as for hardboiled--it crops up in Alfred Bester's sci-fi
all the time. If you ignore the trappings of robots and space
ships and such, what you're really reading is a punchy, pacey
Hammettesque thriller.
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