Hardboiled detective fiction is a literary style which portrays crime and violence in an unsentimental way.
Pioneered by Carroll John Daly in the mid-1920s, popularized by Dashiell Hammett over the course of the decade, and refined by Raymond Chandler beginning in the late 1930s, hardboiled fiction is most commonly associated with detective stories. From its earliest days, hardboiled fiction was published in and closely associated with so-called ...
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Hardboiled detective fiction is a literary style which portrays crime and violence in an unsentimental way.
Pioneered by Carroll John Daly in the mid-1920s, popularized by Dashiell Hammett over the course of the decade, and refined by Raymond Chandler beginning in the late 1930s, hardboiled fiction is most commonly associated with detective stories. From its earliest days, hardboiled fiction was published in and closely associated with so-called pulp magazines, most famously Black Mask. Later, many hardboiled novels were published by houses specializing in paperback originals, also colloquially known as "pulps." Consequently, "pulp fiction" is often used as a synonym for hardboiled crime fiction. In the United States, the original hardboiled style has been emulated by innumerable writers, notably including Chester Himes, Mickey Spillane, Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Robert B. Parker, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, and Walter Mosley.
The term comes from a colloquial phrase of...
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