Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories

Introduction

Not easily. The very label “hard-boiled” makes it difficult, if not impossible, to come up with a precise and concise formulation. The term has been used and misused by readers, writers, and critics so often that, as with most literary labels, it has become virtually meaningless.

A more worthwhile approach is to list some of the elements contained in commendable crime stories of this type. These elements are not the only ones, to be sure; but for us they are the most vital. The more of them that an author incorporates into a particular work, the greater the work’s merit.

The hard-boiled crime story deals with disorder, disaffection, and dissatisfaction. Throughout the genre’s seventy-year history, this has remained a constant and central tenet. The typical hard-boiled character (if not the typical hard-boiled writer) has a jaundiced view of government, power, and the law. He (or, sometimes, she) is often a loner, a social misfit. If he is on the side of the angels, he is likely to be a cynical idealist: he believes that society is corrupt, but he also believes in justice and will make it his business to do whatever is necessary to see that justice is done. If he walks the other side of the mean streets, he walks them at night; he is likely a predator, and as morally bankrupt as any human being can be. In the noir world, extremes are the norm; clashes between good and evil are never petty, and good does not always triumph, nor is justice always done.

A hard-boiled story must emphasize character and the problems inherent in human behavior. Character conflict is essential; the crime or threat of crime with which the story is concerned is of secondary importance.

It must be reflective of the times in which it was written, providing an accurate, honest, and realistic depiction of its locale (whether urban, suburban, or rural) and of the individuals who inhabit that locale. Even more important, it must offer some insight into the social, political, and/or moral climate of its era. It must, as critic David Madden has written, “reflect [its] world in a way that is at once an objective description and an implicit judgment of it.” Entertainment alone is not a sufficient raison d’être.

Even though it involves some type of violent crime, a hard-boiled crime story must not use unmotivated violence or violence for the sake of sensationalism: The mere threat of brute force is often sufficient.

It must have, in Benjamin Appel’s phrase, “living people talking a living language,” however harsh, cruel, or obscene these people and that language may be.

It should generate, as much as possible, what Raymond Chandler called “a smell of fear.”

The presence of these various elements was one of three criteria we used in selecting stories for Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories. The second criterion was a given story’s familiarity and accessibility to today’s readers. Many hard-boiled tales have been anthologized in recent years; some, such as Chandler’s “Red Wind,” have been overanthologized. Wherever possible, therefore, we chose stories that either have never before appeared in an anthology or at least have not been reprinted too recently. In a few instances, where the work of such icons as Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross Macdonald is limited in quantity, and either still in print or at any rate easily obtainable in other sources, we chose representative stories that, in our opinion, have had the least amount of exposure.

The third criterion was the authors themselves. While we considered it necessary — indeed, crucial — to include a wide range of the form’s major practitioners, at the same time we grew aware, as we researched various magazine and book sources, of how much excellent neglected fiction they contain by writers not known to us (such as William Cole and James Hannah). As a result, in preparing the final table of contents, we decided that although preference should be given to those individuals whose body of work has defined, shaped, and influenced American hard-boiled crime writing over the past seven decades, it was imperative to include stories by lesser-known authors.

We run the risk — as all anthologists do — of excluding favorite stories or favorite authors. Our choices will certainly not please all readers; we would be amazed if they did. Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that some writers were omitted because of space limitations, while other notables in the hard-boiled tradition were left out simply because they produced no short pieces worthy of the distinction, or they wrote short stories that in our estimation do not have the quality of their longer works.

Although the hard-boiled story as we know it today was born in the 1920s, hard-boiled writing did not spring fully fledged from that antisocial maelstrom of the years between the two world wars. It was a mélange of different styles and different genres, and its heroic figures can be traced back a hundred years earlier, to both the myth and the reality of the western frontier. The history of the United States abounds with larger-than-life loners whose accomplishments, whose very survival, depended on an uncompromising toughness and a willingness to enter into struggles against seemingly insurmountable odds: Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Davy Crockett, Jim Bridger, Mike Fink, Jim Bowie. Such rugged individualists inspired the creation of mythical heroes — Paul Bunyan, for instance — and of fictional men of action. Both James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo and Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab are hunters driven by forces outside themselves, and in that sense are perfect paradigms of the modern private eye. Even Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, and certainly Jack London’s Wolf Larsen, have elements of the hard-boiled knight in their makeup.

Similarly, American history is filled with scoundrels and outlaws; persons motivated by greed, lust, and power; persons who hold human values and human life in little regard: William Bonney, John Wesley Hardin, Belle Starr, Herman W. Mudgett, and all the little-known and long-forgotten grifters, gamblers, confidence swindlers, whores, thieves, and paid assassins who inhabited the towns and cities, followed the railroads westward, and flocked to the gold-mining camps. These figures likewise inspired nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors, among them Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Frank R. Stockton, Upton Sinclair, and O. Henry. They, too, are the antecedents of the individuals who live in the pages of the modern noir story.

Literary writers were not the only ones energized by both heroic and villainous men and women and their deeds. Writers of popular fiction were equally motivated, in particular during the last four decades of the nineteenth century, when the “dime novel” pioneered by New Yorker Erastus Beadle revolutionized mass-market publishing. The first of Beadle’s slender, cheaply printed story booklets appeared in June 1860. Compulsory education in most states had created a growing number of readers, many of whom were more interested in escapist entertainment than in literary fiction and could not afford the 25 cents for which paper-covered novels were then sold. Beadle’s Dime Novel Library was an instant success and spawned scores of competitively priced series from other publishers.

Early dime novels were melodramatic tales with historical, sea, and frontier settings; but in the 1870s, stories of street life in New York City and Philadelphia came into vogue, and soon afterward, into this milieu, the mass-audience detective story was born. “Old Sleuth, the Detective” appeared in Fireside Companion in June 1872 and was soon followed by dozens of other investigators of every conceivable occupation and based in every major city from Boston to San Francisco. Not all were men, either; successful series featured such women sleuths as Round Kate and the Western Lady Detective.

By today’s standards, the dime-novel detective story was pallid juvenile fare. There was little character development; for the most part, the protagonists were ciphers, with neither moral code nor personality. The streets and alleys they prowled were those of hack writers’ imaginations. Even the most popular and best-known of the dime-novel manhunters, Nick Carter (whose twenty-year career began in 1886 in New York Weekly), offered little in the way of realism, humanity, or social conscience. These characters were detectives in name only, in only the barest sense progenitors of the tough-guy hero of the twentieth century. Yet it was their devotion to justice and their feats of derring-do that paved the way for their hard-boiled offspring. Cheap-fiction publishers of the early twentieth century would not have been so quick to promote the crime story if it had not been for the enormous followings built up by the dime-novel sleuths.

Another development in the birth of the noir crime story, this one of major proportions, also began in the nineteenth century. Frank A. Munsey, a tightfisted magazine publisher of adventure stories for young adults, decided in 1895 to revamp one of his publications, Argosy, in two distinct ways: first, by turning it into an all-fiction magazine aimed at adult readers; and second, by printing the new Argosy on rough wood-pulp paper, which was much less expensive than the smooth paper stock that was standard for periodicals of the time. The conversion to wood pulp allowed Munsey to print and circulate a greater number of copies of Argosy and his other magazines. The move was rewarded by a substantial increase in sales. By the turn of the century, Argosy’s circulation topped 80,000 copies a month, and by 1910 it had soared to 250,000 copies.

Munsey’s rivals — chiefly, Street & Smith, which had supplanted Erastus Beadle and his partner, Robert Adams, as the predominant supplier of dime novels — soon brought out seven- by ten-inch pulp-paper magazines of their own. Many more so-called pulps were introduced during the 1910s: at first mostly general fiction publications, and then an increasing number specializing in categories such as Western stories and, beginning in 1915, detective stories. The first detective pulp was in fact a conversion of Street & Smith’s thriller, Nick Carter, which in its new incarnation featured the adventures of other sleuths in addition to Nick Carter. With the exception of love-story magazines, the pulps were aimed primarily at a male readership; for this reason, especially from the 1920s onward, they were given vividly colored enameled covers whose artwork usually depicted scenes of high melodrama. Mass-market readers overwhelmingly preferred this new form of cheap fiction; dime novels and their cousins, flimsy story-paper weeklies, were virtually extinct by the end of the 1920s.

In 1920, another important development occurred, ironically enough as the long-range result of a decision by a pair of literary entrepreneurs, H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, who would later sneer openly at hard-boiled fiction. Mencken and Nathan were co-owners of the Smart Set, a glossy “magazine of cleverness” that was in constant financial trouble. They sought to subsidize it by publishing a pulp monthly that they called The Black Mask — “a lousy magazine, all detective stories, [that has] burdened Nathan and me with disagreeable work,” as Mencken complained in a letter. Under their brief auspices, Black Mask was largely stocked with mannered, drawing-room-type mystery stories. It attracted women readers as well as men (one of its early enthusiasts was reputedly Woodrow Wilson), and its sales were substantial enough to allow Mencken and Nathan to sell it after six months for $12,500, a tidy profit on an initial investment of $500. The new owners, Pro-Distributors Corporation, appointed George W. Sutton and then P. C. Cody as editors. Cody, in particular, transformed the magazine into one that featured crime stories in American settings (along with adventure and Western stories). Black Mask’s “new look” attracted two young writers whose work would have a strong impact on the hard-boiled form, one briefly and the other lastingly.

“Three Gun Terry,” a tough-minded story by Carroll John Daly, was printed in the May 15, 1923, issue. Just two weeks later, Daly’s byline topped the first fully realized private-eye tale, “Knights of the Open Palm,” an anti-Ku Klux Klan diatribe that starred a violent, poorly educated, somewhat sadistic loner named Race Williams. Readers embraced Williams with such fervor that Daly was encouraged to bring him back fifty-two times over the next dozen years. In a 1930 readers’ poll, Daly was judged Black Mask’s favorite writer.

Despite his popularity, Daly was a crude and badly flawed writer. He was cursed with a tin ear where speech patterns of the day were concerned and possessed no talent at all for characterization. His action sequences (on which all his tales relied heavily) were invariably implausible, his plotting was weak and obvious, all his characters seem hewn from the same block of wood, and the East Coast environs in which Race Williams operated were no more authentically portrayed than were those in the dime-novel detective stories.

A far more literate and polished writer, whose detective was modeled on a real-life Pinkerton agent and whose stories were set in a sharply and believably drawn northern California milieu, was Dashiell Hammett. His first Continental Op story, “Arson Plus,” was published in the October 1, 1923, issue under the pen name Peter Collinson, four months after Race Williams’s debut. It was Hammett’s third appearance in Black Mask, the previous two having also carried the Collinson byline. His second Op novelette, “Crooked Souls,” published two weeks after “Arson Plus,” was Hammett’s first appearance in the magazine under his own name. Altogether, the Op was featured in two dozen Black Mask stories, plus the serialized versions of The Dain Curse and Red Harvest, from 1923 to 1929. The Maltese Falcon, Hammett’s hugely influential novel, in which San Francisco private eye Sam Spade pursues the fabulous jewel-encrusted black bird, “the stuff that dreams are made of,” was also serialized in Black Mask before its publication in book form in 1930.

Hammett’s position as patriarch of the hard-boiled crime story owes as much to the efforts of Joseph T. “Cap” Shaw, who took over the editorship of Black Mask in 1926, as to his own considerable talent. Shaw, a retired army captain and friend of new publisher Ray Holland, was unfamiliar with the magazine; in fact, he had never read any pulp magazine prior to assuming his editorial duties. He did not care for what he found in previous issues: he felt that the contents lacked direction. The one Black Mask writer whose work he did like was Hammett, and it was Hammett he chose as the model for what he thought the magazine should be — one devoted to a new type and new style of detective writing.

The subject matter with which Hammett dealt and on which Shaw would focus Black Mask was not the bloodless crimes of Victorian-era mysteries or the hack-generated imaginary felonies of the dime novels; it was genuine sin and vice, of the sort their readers saw all around them and read about in their daily newspapers. The 1920s were a lawless decade, for this was the era of the Volstead Act, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which expressly forbade the brewing and distilling of all intoxicating alcohol. Prohibition, however lofty the motives and intentions behind it, was a staggering legislative and human blunder whose ramifications are still being felt three-quarters of a century later. The illicit manufacture of and trafficking in liquor was a winked-at commonplace, and illegality became an accepted norm. This nationwide amorality — crime almost as a way of life — allowed the underworld to organize and grow strong enough for its corruption to reach into the highest levels of government and society. Feud as they might, kill one another as they did, Alphonse Capone and his gangster cohorts flourished in a climate of violence, brutality, and unconstrained social and commercial vice. It was inevitable that the hard-boiled-fiction movement, given the leadership of individuals such as Hammett and Shaw, would also grow and flourish against this background of disorder and disaffection.

Shaw would later define the Black Mask prose style as “hard, brittle... a full employment of the function of dialogue, and authenticity in characterization and action.” A fast tempo and “economy of expression” were two other ingredients. (Neither Hammett nor Shaw invented the style, of course. Its emphasis on dialogue, its use of vernacular, and its basic colloquial rhythm were offshoots of the styles employed by Sherwood Anderson and Ring Lardner and polished and simplified by Ernest Hemingway. What Hammett brought to it was “romantic realism,” in Ellery Queen’s phrase: he placed his stories against a stark background; peopled them with men and women who seemed truly to sweat, bleed, and ache; and made the pursuit of justice a noble as well as a necessary goal.)

Over Shaw’s ten-year editorial reign, he developed a nucleus of writers who adhered to — and in some cases refined — what would come to be known as the Black Mask school: Raymond Chandler, Frederick Nebel, Raoul Whitfield, Paul Cain (George Sims), Horace McCoy, Dwight V. Babcock, George Harmon Coxe, Norbert Davis. These writers created heroes who were worthy of Cooper’s Bumppo and Melville’s Ahab — true rugged individualists who believed that murder will out, who were determined to see law and order prevail no matter what the cost. Chandler’s Carmady, an early version of Philip Marlowe, was one such creation. Others were Nebel’s police captain MacBride and Kennedy of the Free Press; Coxe’s crime photographer, Flashgun Casey; and Whitfield’s private detective, Ben Jardinn.

It should not be thought, however, that Hammett and his followers wrote for any high-minded or didactic purpose, or to any grand design. Although there was in their work the dominant element of “taking murder out of the library and putting it back on the streets where it belonged,” in Chandler’s celebrated phrase, these writers were essentially storytellers, aiming their wares at a large and sympathetic but by no means uncritical audience. It was incumbent on them to produce stories that gripped, entertained, surprised; otherwise, the stories would not be bought and published. Thus even though the writers were working with realistic material and in a fresh idiom, to some extent they still relied on past detective-story traditions, motivations, and (often enough) clichés.

The best of the craftsmen under Shaw’s tutelage were so adept at their lessons that they soon graduated to other, higher-paying media: glossy-paper magazines, novels, radio scripts, Hollywood screenplays. Some of their creations also went on to success outside the pages of Black Mask. Ben Jardinn was featured in one of the better early Hollywood private-eye novels, Raoul Whitfield’s Death in a Bowl (1931). Flashgun Casey enjoyed a wide following in a series of novels by George Harmon Coxe, as well as in his own radio show, Casey, Crime Photographer, in the 1940s. Curiously enough, the toughest of all the hard-boiled characters to come out of Black Mask, Paul Cain’s Gerry Kells, was neither a hero nor a detective; Kells, in fact, was in many ways the first true antihero in noir fiction — a murderous, amoral gambler and racketeer whose base of operations was the Los Angeles underworld. Five interconnected stories featuring Kells were joined in the 1933 novel Fast One, a rock-hard tale that is arguably the harshest and most relentless of all the hard-boiled crime novels.

With Shaw at the helm, Black Mask’s circulation increased dramatically at the end of his first year and peaked in 1930 at 103,000 copies a month. Predictably, its early success brought on imitators, including Fiction House’s short-lived Black Aces and Popular Publications’ long-lived Dime Detective. By the mid-1930s, however, Shaw had lost or was about to lose most of his major writers — Hammett, Nebel, Whitfield, Coxe, McCoy — to the more lucrative and challenging media; only Chandler remained. Circulation had fallen off, and financial cutbacks were imminent. One cutback was to be in Shaw’s salary; he objected vehemently, and in the fall of 1936 he was relieved of his editorial duties. (In sympathy, Chandler quit Black Mask as well. His last few pulp crime stories appeared in Dime Detective and in Street & Smith’s Detective Story.)

Despite the efforts of new editor Fanny Ellsworth, sales of Black Mask continued to decline, and in 1940 the magazine was sold to Popular Publications. It ended its life rather ignominiously in 1951, as a second-string title in Popular’s chain of detective pulps, behind Dime Detective, Detective Tales, and New Detective. But the Black Mask school remained the hard-boiled standard for all pulp crime fiction during the last twenty years of the pulp-magazine era, and for much of the hard-boiled fiction — short stories and novels alike — that has been published since.

The tough crime story was not limited to publication in pulp magazines or the tough crime novel to publication within the mystery and detective genre, once the Roaring Twenties gave way to the Depression thirties. Grinding poverty, unemployment, homelessness, bank and small-business failures in alarming numbers, ongoing police and political corruption and rampant gangsterism, violent clashes between union organizers and management scabs in both industry and agriculture — these were the social ills of the Great Depression. Combined with a vast westward migration from the Midwest and the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma and Arkansas to California’s “promised land,” these real-life trends gave rise to a different type of hard-boiled fiction that was more solidly rooted in the literary mainstream. Some of the period’s angriest and most savagely realistic short stories were published in such “quality” magazines as American Mercury, Story, Esquire, Harper’s, and Liberty. Many mainstream novels of the 1930s had grim themes, in particular those that championed the cause of the proletariat; many dealt wholly or in part with violent crime, often in a bitterly existential fashion. A few, although treated less than respectfully by critics of the time, have endured and achieved the status of classics: James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Benjamin Appel’s Brain Guy (1934), Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935), Edward Anderson’s Thieves Like Us (1937), Richard Hallas’s You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up (1938), and James Ross’s They Don’t Dance Much (1940).

With a few exceptions, the 1940s were a static decade for the hard-boiled crime story. Good work appeared in genre and other magazines, but most of it was formulaic and none of it broke any new ground. A number of talented writers made their debuts in the crime pulps, among them John D. MacDonald, Day Keene, and David Goodis; their primary contributions would come later, however, in the novel form. Easily the grittiest of the decade’s novels was Jonathan Latimer’s Solomon’s Vineyard (1941), a work so tough-minded and sexually explicit that no American publisher would take a chance on it in its original form; it was first published in England (where its dust-jacket blurb trumpeted: “It’s got everything but an abortion and a tornado,” neglecting to mention that one of the things it does have is necrophilia). Its first publication in the United States was not until nine years later, in a heavily expurgated paperback edition retitled The Fifth Grave. The original text did not see print in the United States until 1982, and then only in a limited edition of 326 copies from a small press.

A scattering of very good private-eye novels — and one seminal private-eye novel — were published in the 1940s. The very good ones include Norbert Davis’s fast and funny Mouse in the Mountain and Sally’s in the Alley, both published in 1943 and both featuring Doan and his Great Dane, Carstairs; Leigh Brackett’s Chandleresque No Good from a Corpse (1944); the first three Paul Pine adventures by John Evans (Howard Browne), Halo in Blood (1946), Halo for Satan (1948), and Halo in Brass (1949); the first of Wade Miller’s Max Thursday novels, Guilty Bystander (1947); and the first Lew Archer investigation by Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar), The Moving Target (1949).

The decade’s most influential hard-boiled detective novel is Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer debut, I, the fury. When this book was published in 1947, it had an immediate and profound impact on noir fiction. Action, sex, and vigilante justice were nothing new to the private-eye tale: Carroll John Daly (an admitted influence on Spillane’s work) had introduced this provocative mix more than twenty years earlier in his Race Williams melodramas, and other writers, including Hammett and Chandler, had utilized it with varying degrees of emphasis and success. But no one presented sex, violence, and the personal vendetta in such a heady stew as Spillane in I, the Jury: savagely, implacably, and with the most cold-blooded (or hot-blooded, depending on one’s perspective) denouement in the history of the genre — an ending guaranteed, as more than one critic has pointed out, to enrage any feminist.

I, the Jury, and such subsequent Mike Hammer novels as My Gun Is Quick (1950), Vengeance Is Mine (1950), and Kiss Me Deadly (1952), sold millions of copies and opened up the hard-boiled market to hundreds of mimics in the 1950s and 1960s. Spillane’s work, far more than that of any other writer, dictated which sort of crime fiction was to be published as paperback originals over the next twenty years. And his influence on hard-boiled mysteries as a whole, whether one likes the idea or not (many readers and critics find the Mike Hammer stories repellent), cannot be ignored or underestimated.

Fawcett Gold Medal was the first of the softcover publishers to specialize in original, male-oriented category fiction. When the first Gold Medal novels appeared in late 1949, editors Richard Carroll and Bill Lengel had already assembled (and would continue to assemble) a stable of some of the best popular writers of the period by paying royalty advances on the number of copies printed, rather than on the number of copies sold; thus writers received handsome initial payments, up to four times as much as hardcover publishers were paying. Into the Gold Medal camp came such established names as W. R. Burnett, Cornell Woolrich, Sax Rohmer, and Wade Miller; such first-rank pulp writers as John D. MacDonald, Bruno Fischer, Day Keene, David Goodis, and Harry Whittington; and such talented newcomers as Charles Williams, Stephen Marlowe, and Gil Brewer.

What the Fawcett brain trust and the Fawcett writers succeeded in doing was adapting the tried-and-true pulp formula of the 1930s and 1940s to postwar American society, with all its changes in lifestyle and morality and its newfound sophistication. (This, too, was what Spillane had done and would continue to do in his Mike Hammer novels.) Instead of a bulky magazine full of short stories, Fawcett published brand-new, easy-to-read novels in a convenient pocket-size format. Instead of gaudy, pulp-style cover art, Fawcett utilized the “peekaboo sex” approach to catching the reader’s eye: women depicted as either being nude (as seen from the side or rear) or showing a great deal of cleavage or leg or both, in a variety of provocative poses. Instead of printing hundreds of thousands of copies of a small number of titles, Fawcett printed hundreds of thousands of copies of many titles in order to reach every possible outlet and buyer. As a result, many Gold Medal novels, particularly in the early 1950s, sold more than a million copies each.

Fawcett and the best of its competitors — Avon, Dell, Popular Library, Lion — may have been selling pulp fiction, but it was an upscale variety. The novels they brought out were short (generally about 50,000 words), fast-paced, and action-oriented. They were well written, well plotted, peopled by sharply delineated and believable characters, spiced with sex, often imbued with psychological insight, and set in vividly drawn, often exotic locales. The best of these paperback originals were in fact the apotheosis of pulp fiction — rough-hewn, minor works of art, perfectly suited to and representative of their era. Notable individual titles include Jim Thompson’s harrowing excursion into the mind of a serial murderer, The Killer Inside Me (1952); John D. MacDonald’s The Damned (1952); David Goodis’s Street of the Lost (1952); Gil Brewer’s A Killer Is Loose (1954); Harry Whittington’s Brute in Brass (1956); and Jack Dillon’s Hemingway pastiche, A Great Day for Dying (1968). A number of long-running noir series were also launched and developed as paperback originals during the 1950s and 1960s; among these were the Eighty-seventh Precinct novels by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter), begun with Cop Hater (1956); Chester Himes’s Harlem police procedurals, featuring Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones and begun with For the Love of Immabelle (1957); and the antihero Parker created by Richard Stark (Donald Westlake) and begun with The Hunter (1962).

While the bulk of the softcover originals published in the 1950s and 1960s were concerned with violent crime of an interpersonal nature, a percentage of them — and a larger percentage of hardcover novels and short stories — embraced larger themes: Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunt, widespread fear of nuclear annihilation, rampant urban juvenile delinquency, drug addiction, and the threat of organized crime (the hearings held by Senator Estes Kefauver’s Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, which were nationally broadcast on radio and television in 1950 and 1951, opened the American people’s eyes not only to the threat but also to the underworld’s deep and longstanding ties to local political officials). In response, heroic struggles against the Red Menace were the stuff of such novels as Mickey Spillane’s One Lonely Night (1951); grim accounts of juvenile gangs filled Hal Ellson’s Tomboy (1950), Benjamin Appel’s Life and Death of a Tough Guy (1955), and Harlan Ellison’s Bumble (1958); drug addiction was examined in Ellson’s The Golden Spike (1952) and Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book (1960); the effects of organized crime were chronicled in Louis Malley’s Horns for the Devil (1951), Harry Grey’s The Hoods (1952), and Appel’s The Raw Edge (1958). Many hard-boiled novels — and such documentary-style films as The Captive City (1951) and Big Jim McLain (1952) — treated their subject matter in highly sensationalized and inflammatory fashion, in keeping with the somewhat frenzied atmosphere of the period. The same was even more true of the hard-boiled short story.

In the same way that pulp magazines had brought about the decline and fall of dime novels, paperback originals and the new medium of television sounded a death knell for the pulps. All major pulp titles were extinct by 1954. The new domain of the hard-boiled short story, in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, was the digest-size detective magazine. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (EQMM) had been well established since 1941, but only occasionally did its editor-in-chief, Frederic Dannay, include a genuinely gritty tale; Dannay was not a proponent of the form (except for Hammett’s work, which he admired extravagantly). The time was ripe for a new outlet devoted solely to the form, and in 1953 one came along: Manhunt, a showcase for tough, downbeat, violent stories of “the seamier side” of contemporary life. Manhunt’s premier issue, dated January 1953, featured the first installment of a new serial by Mickey Spillane, “Everybody’s Watching Me,” plus short fiction by such established names as William Irish (Cornell Woolrich) and Kenneth Millar (Ross Macdonald) and such future stars as Evan Hunter. Sales far exceeded the expectations of its publisher, Michael St. John, and its editor, John McCloud — nearly 500,000 copies of that first issue — and instantly established Manhunt as the new standard bearer.

So successful was the magazine in the early to mid-1950s that St. John and McCloud were able to elicit hard-edged original stories from Erle Stanley Gardner, Rex Stout, Fredric Brown, and other respected mystery writers, as well as from a surprising array of literary figures: James M. Cain, Nelson Algren, Erskine Caldwell, James T. Farrell, Charles Jackson, and Ira Levin. A plethora of Manhunt clones with tough, staccato titles that almost verged on self-parody soon crowded the newsstands: Accused, Hunted, Pursuit, Guilty, Trapped, Two-Fisted, Sure-Fire, Justice, Suspect, and four from Manhunt’s own publishing company: Verdict, Menace, Murder! and Mantrap. Few of these lasted more than a handful of issues. A small number survived the decade (mainly those, such as Guilty and Trapped, that specialized in brutal stories about juvenile delinquents), but even that group had all but disappeared by the end of 1962.

Manhunt reigned for a scant few years; by 1959, its quality and its circulation had fallen off radically, as a result of editorial and financial mishandling, apathy, and changing reader tastes. The last important author and story to appear in its pages was Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe tale “Wrong Pigeon” in the February 1960 issue; the story had been unpublished in the United States, although it had appeared in England as “The Pencil.” Few writers of note contributed material to Manhunt from 1960 onward. It lingered until 1967, most of the time as a bimonthly under different ownership. When it finally died it was a ghost of its former self, publishing reprints from its heyday and generally poor original stories by unknowns.

Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine (MSMM) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (AHMM), both founded in 1956 and both moderately successful as purveyors of genre crime stories, were the main inheritors of the post-1960 hard-boiled short story. Neither specialized in the form, however, though the preponderance of selections in most issues of MSMM could be termed hard-boiled. Now and then, a new periodical devoted to noir fiction would appear — notably, Ed McBain’s Mystery Book in 1960 and Mystery Monthly in 1975 — but these had short runs.

The last issue of MSMM was published in 1985. Since then, the hard-boiled short has had no regular forum. One quarterly magazine, Hard-boiled, is currently in existence, but it is semiprofessionally produced and has a limited circulation. EQMM and AHMM, the last of the mystery digests, publish hard-boiled stories now and then, as do such magazines as Playboy. Theme anthologies of original stories have provided another inconsistent market. Among anthologies of this type are four published under the auspices of the Private Eye Writers of America: The Eyes Have It (1984), Mean Streets (1986), An Eye for Justice (1988), and Justice for Hire (1990).

It is in the novel form that the hard-boiled story has had the most growth over the past quarter-century, in large part as a response to the Pandora’s box of disorders afflicting modern society: the insidious and epidemic presence of drugs and drug trafficking, random violence, AIDS, homelessness, the abortion issue, child abuse, spousal abuse, and rape. Until the constraints placed on writers by society’s moral guardians began to relax in the early 1970s, such issues had to be treated either in oblique, often superficial fashion or not at all. Today’s writers of hard-boiled fiction have far more latitude than their predecessors did to examine their subject matter honestly and incisively, as frankly and at whatever depth they deem necessary. Their work not only is more searching and therefore more powerful than that of their predecessors, but is erasing the line of demarcation between genre crime fiction and literature. In effect, the hard-boiled crime story has grown into adulthood, and in the process has attained some of the wisdom and insight of adulthood. To say that it is capable of attaining a great deal more is to bestow on it both high praise and the challenge of responsibility.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, several notable detective characters entered the field, among them Lawrence Block’s alcoholic former New York cop Matt Scudder, in Sins of the Fathers (1976); James Crumley’s Shugrue, in The Last Good Kiss (1978); Jonathan Valin’s Cincinnati private eye Harry Stoner, in The Lime Pit (1980); and Loren D. Estleman’s Detroit-based Amos Walker, in Motor City Blue (1980). The emergence over the past fifteen years of the female private eye (and such offshoots as realistically portrayed women cops, probation officers, and lawyers) has broadened the hard-boiled form’s scope and horizon; with relatively few exceptions, it had been a male-dominated subgenre, in terms of both its writers and its readers. The best and most popular of these tough new women sleuths are Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone, who made her debut in Edwin of the Iron Shoes (1977) as the first fully realized female private eye created by a woman; Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone, who first appeared in A Is for Alibi (1981); and Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski, whose initial investigation was Indemnity Only (1982).

Most significant among recent nonseries noir novels are those that address major social issues. Jonathan Kellerman and Andrew Vachss have each written harsh condemnations of child abuse, in such novels as When the Bough Breaks (1985) and Hard Candy (1989), respectively. In Bitter Medicine (1987), Sara Paretsky pulls no punches in addressing women’s health issues. The Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris’s 1988 bestseller, unrelentingly probes the psychology of the serial killer. The mounting controversy surrounding illegal immigration is the subject of Marcia Muller’s Wolf in the Shadows (1993). Sexual harassment is the central theme of Linda Grant’s A Woman’s Place (1994), and sexual exploitation of women through pornography is the topic explored by Lia Matera in Face Value (1994).

This introduction would not be complete without a brief mention of film noir. Film has proved fertile ground for the hard-boiled movement from the 1930s to the present day. During the 1940s and 1950s, directors seized on the grim and at times unremittingly bleak visions of Cornell Woolrich, James M. Cain, and David Goodis, among others, and transformed them into minor masterpieces of moody, shadow-filled filmmaking. There are dozens of film noir classics; a few of the outstanding examples based on hard-boiled fiction include Jacques Tourneur’s The Leopard Man (1943), taken from Woolrich’s Black Alibi; Edward Dmytryk’s Murder My Sweet (1944), adapted from Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, Delmer Daves’s Dark Passage (1947), whose source was a book of the same title by David Goodis; Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), based on a William P. McGivern novel of that name; and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), adapted from Lionel White’s Clean Break.

Over the past decade and a half, both directors and writers in the United States have become increasingly aware of the hard-boiled genre, reinterpreting old noir favorites such as James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (first filmed in 1946 and remade in 1981 from a taut David Mamet script); updating novels by hard-boiled writers of the 1950s into dazzling screenplays, as Donald Westlake did with Jim Thompson’s The Grifters (published in 1963, filmed in 1990); or creating entirely new works so immoderately vicious that they exceed by a considerable degree the old conventions of cinema noir. The current high priest of designer violence is director and writer Quentin Tarantino, who plunders the plots of old films and 1940s pulp fiction and reshapes them into a purely 1990s product that resonates with aberrant and often stomach-churning brutality. The idea behind the work of auteurs such as Tarantino is that cinematic violence is both fun and cathartic, a concept that has a certain validity. In the process, however, characters lose their humanity and become mere symbols, and as Dashiell Hammett once implied in a letter to Cap Shaw, it is difficult to relate to a symbol no matter how cleverly or wittily the symbol behaves.

A final word about the stories we have selected for inclusion.

The reader will note that we have taken several from the 1930s and several from the 1950s, while other decades are more sparsely represented. The imbalance is deliberate. The 1930s were the single most important decade in the form’s development, thanks to Hammett, Chandler, Shaw, and numerous others. The 1950s was its renaissance decade, the first in which mystery-genre specialists were able to shed some of the restrictions of style and content created by hard-boiled crime writing’s pulp origins and stretch its limits in inventive new ways. In terms of volume, more first-rate works were published during that ten-year span than during any other.

The 1990s may prove to be the form’s third most important decade. Certainly the novels and stories that have been published thus far foreshadow another renaissance period in which contemporary authors will expand its boundaries even further. It may well be that editors of future anthologies of hard-boiled stories will want to give much greater emphasis than we have to this final decade before the millennium. If so, then its promise will have been fulfilled.