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Topic: Hard boiled detective


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In the News (Mon 28 Dec 09)

  
  DETECTFILM
The detective genre in film is difficult to define because the content and conventions of the detective film can be seen as crossing over into other genres, and it can be regarded as a subcategory of the overarching genre of the crime film (along with the gangster film, the thriller, and the social-problem film).
The narrative of the detective film follows the hero's investigation of a crime; however, it also offers an investigation of the detective as his masculinity is tested and proven through his success in solving the case.
The conservative image of masculinity and law-enforcement embodied by the procedural detective was eradicated by the arrival of the vigilante cop film in the late 1960s.
www.crimeculture.com /Contents/detectivefilm.htm   (2130 words)

  
 The Hard Boiled School of Detective Fiction
The gulf between hard boiled and golden age crime fiction could not be greater, whilst remaining in the same basic genre they are fundamentally different.
The biggest innovation that the hard boiled school brought to detective fiction was the use of the 'first person narrative' to tell the story.
Being tough is a crucial element of the successful hard boiled character, although interestingly, its two greatest exponents, Hammett and Chandler, tended to demonstrate their characters toughness not by winning fights but by taking a beating 'like a man' or by staying 'cool' and avoiding a sticky situation with sharp repartee and one liners.
www.classiccrimefiction.com /hardboiled.htm   (500 words)

  
 [No title]
The detective’s job is to identify the criminal, which should lead to the culprit’s removal from society and a return to the status quo or a closely related equilibrium.
Largely isolated from the everyday world (as with Nero Wolfe and his orchids), the detective emerges to examine a riddle, produces a correct answer, and retreats until the next time his or her superior thinking skills are needed once again.
Where the classical detective may be seen as a sort of wizard, applying wisdom and learning to dispatch evil, the model for the hard-boiled character is the knight who slays dragons with physical force, and the motif of the knight has been employed by fictional private eyes from Philip Marlowe to Travis McGee.
www.newberry.edu /wmoore/Documents/Magnapaper.doc   (2278 words)

  
 Studies in Popular Culture 24.1   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
When the detective in the classic tradition has been female, as in the case of Miss Marple, her marginality is both a strength and a weakness, her function the maintenance of the status quo.
Because their uses of the Gothic as well as of the two detective traditions differ, both Paretsky and Cody are exciting writers to examine in a course on detective fiction, or indeed in any course focusing on forms of fiction.
Teaching the Gothic through detective fiction is helpful as a way of introducing students to the ways the very choice to write within a popular literary genre itself implicitly raises feminist issues.
pcasacas.org /SPC/spcissues/24.1/ford.htm   (2990 words)

  
 Student Book Competition - Raymond Garcia   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
The world of hard boiled fiction was inevitably a violent one, populated by sordid characters of all stripe.
The lines between hard boiled and noir writing are rarely clear, though I'm sure many scholars of American literature would disagree, as it is their job to establish such lines.
Ellroy's hard boiled noir story of two cops and their search for the killer of the Black Dahlia is a superb fictionalized account of a real life unsolved mystery.
www.lib.msu.edu /events/contest/garcia99.htm   (4431 words)

  
 Hard-boiled Histories || Americana: The Journal Of American Popular Culture 1900-Present
Unlike earlier detective stories, that is, hard-boiled fiction is not much concerned with epistemology, or with the processes of intellection, or even with the work of detection as a means of generating suspense.
The detective's work in these novels, then, is chiefly of interest because it serves to connect the detective hero with the seamy underworld, which serves in turn as a figure for what these novels take to be the reality of human experience.
The detective is at once the embodiment and the master of this world, both immersed and cynically detached.
www.americanpopularculture.com /journal/articles/fall_2003/novak.htm   (3851 words)

  
 89.04.09: Plot, Character and Setting: A Study of Mystery and Detective Fiction
The detective hero is a man of the wilderness but the wilderness has disappeared, replaced by the seaminess of the city.
This is where the detective hero fights against the evils of society, and he is left cynical and disillusioned in the end, his strength remaining because of his own moral code, his own sense of truth and right and wrong.
The hard-boiled detective can never hope for full resolution of the crime, and restoration of society as it was before the crime because evil is too pervasive in his environment.
www.yale.edu /ynhti/curriculum/units/1989/4/89.04.09.x.html   (7071 words)

  
 Hard-boiled detective -- Facts, Info, and Encyclopedia article   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
Hard-boiled detective is a type of character that appears in crime and mystery fiction, but occasionally in other genres as well.
Generally, but not always, a (Someone who can be employed as a detective to collect information) private investigator with a great deal of cyncism and world-weariness, he investigates crimes for money.
For all of his cyncism, the hard-boiled detective is generally quite ethical.
www.absoluteastronomy.com /encyclopedia/h/ha/hard-boiled_detective.htm   (214 words)

  
 Fiction/Mystery,Detective/Hard-Boiled
Hard NewsRune is an aspiring filmmaker with more ambition than political savvy, paying her dues as an assistant cameraperson for the local news.
The Detective Is DeadWith three killers free after beating the rap, their victim's drug empire is up for grabs and the cops are relying on less conventional methods to do their job.
Witch HuntPursued by three obsessed detectives, an assassin known as Witch undertakes an assignment with global ramifications that forces those who are investigating her to follow leads within the highest ranks of international law and finance.By: Rankin, IanBinding: HARDCOVER Number of Pages: 387...
www.booksbytesandbeyond.com /books/FIC022010.html   (5611 words)

  
 Film Noir and the Hard-Boiled Detective Hero, by John Blaser
The American hard-boiled detective film began to appear in the early 1940s, providing an alternative to the traditional murder mystery that had dominated detective films throughout the silent era and into the 1930s.
The makers of this new type of detective film seemed to recognize that if they were going to create a new cinematic view of the world, they also would have to create a completely new hero to exist in that world.
But while later detectives such as Philip Marlowe were capable of feeling compassion and a certain amount of empathy for other human beings, it is Sam Spade's personal code alone that makes him a hero and is, in the end, the source of his redemption.
www.lib.berkeley.edu /MRC/noir/hb-all.html   (3321 words)

  
 Pulp Fiction (1896)   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
Novels containing detectives or masked avengers and stories that emphasized adventure, war, sports or life in wild west were popular among males.
The most notable features of the hard-boiled detective style became evident in the pulp novels of the 1920's.
The hard-boiled detective story style is seen in the works of several pulp writers such as Dashiell Hammett ("The Maltese Falcon"), Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane.
www2.yk.psu.edu /~jmj3/sna_eli1.htm   (242 words)

  
 Affliction essay @ The Bloody News   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
The detective, he says, is "tough," and has "a cynical way of acting and thinking that [separates him] from the world of everyday emotions--romanticism with a protective shell" (Schrader, 218).
The detective is typically a down-on-his-luck drinker with few friends and a dubious reputation, pouring his energy into solving the problems of others rather than solving those in his own life.
However, “the detective [is] forced to define his own concept of morality and justice, frequently in conflict with the social authority of the police” (143).
www.quartertofour.com /bloodynews/reviews/affliction_erik.html   (2470 words)

  
 Hard Boiled Holmes
The era of detective fiction between the two World Wars is known as the Golden Age.
It’s hard to believe how much malice and mayhem there was in the place.
Jim Thompson’s gritty looks at American life didn’t usually feature detectives, and it’s often hard to find a code of honor when you can’t even locate a sympathetic person in the cast of characters.
www.holmesonscreen.com /HardBoiledHolmes.htm   (1760 words)

  
 Hard-Boiled
Shaw encouraged a high standard of colloquial, racy writing, favouring 'economy of expression' and 'authenticity in character and action’, all of which are important features of the hard-boiled style.
Whereas the traditional mystery story, with its stable triangle of detective, victim and murderer, is reasonably certain to have the detective as the protagonist, much of the crime fiction of this period deliberately violates this convention.
Though Marlowe is caught up in plots of notorious complexity (and is significantly less in control than, say, the figure of the classic detective) he continues to provide the reassurance of a stable and trustworthy perspective.
www.crimeculture.com /Contents/Hard-Boiled.html   (1788 words)

  
 The Looking Glass - Vol. 9, No. 1 - Alice's Academy
George Grella maintains that the American hard-boiled detective story is a romance, a version of the quest, both a search for the truth and an attempt to eradicate evil, a story that combines its romance themes and structures with a tough, realistic surface (7).
The hard-boiled detective is able to perform the shady tasks of breaking and entering, shadowing, and shooting as capably as most criminals.
Sherlock Holmes, detective hero of British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, embodies the faith of late nineteenth-century, middle-class readers in individualized rationality, i.e., in "the rational scientific idea that events are really linked in an unaccidental chain, and the individualistic notion that a single inquirer can--and should--establish the links" (Knight 68).
www.the-looking-glass.net /rabbit/v9i1/alice.html   (6415 words)

  
 Journal of Social History: Watching the detectives: reading dime novels and hard-boiled detective stories in context - ...
She is completely familiar with the entire genre of early-twentieth-century hard-boiled detective fiction as well as with the contemporary African-American, feminist, gay and lesbian detective fiction to which those first authors gave rise.
Smith, on the other hand, loves hard-boiled detective fiction and it's obvious that she reveled in the chance to spend a considerable amount of time immersed in it.
One would expect, as Detective Fiction was published in 2000, to see a certain amount of overlap of its sources with the sources of the previous two.
www.findarticles.com /p/articles/mi_m2005/is_2_36/ai_95829290/pg_2   (952 words)

  
 Hardboiled - TheBestLinks.com - Hard boiled, Crime, Detective fiction, Human sexuality, ...   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
Hard boiled, Hardboiled, Crime, Detective fiction, Human sexuality, Raymond...
A uniquely American style of writing crime fiction pioneered by Dashiell Hammett, refined by Raymond Chandler, and endlessly imitated since by writers such as Mickey Spillane.
Hardboiled fiction is most commonly associated with detective, short stories and novels.
www.thebestlinks.com /Hard_boiled.html   (124 words)

  
 Hard Boiled
Most of their stories featured stereotypical elements -- the brilliant detective, the clueless sidekick and narrator, the cases that were too baffling for the police -- in endless reiterations of the Sherlock Homes formula.
A few other magazines merit distinction: Dime Detective, by Popular Publications, was the most popular mystery pulp of the era; it became the home to Raymond Chandler and other Black Mask alumni after Joseph Shaw was fired in 1936.
Hard Boiled -- Dedicated to hard boiled literature, film noir, radio and TV.
www.panix.com /~mfs/pulp_hard.html   (678 words)

  
 Hardboiled Fiction at The Vintage Library
Started in the 1920s and perfected in the 1930s, the hard boiled detective was one of the most popular forms to arise from the pulp fiction magazines.
The hard boiled detective was a character who had to live on the mean streets of the city where fighting, drinking, swearing, poverty and death were all part of life.
In this new world, the hard boiled detective began to administer a new form of justice where if need be, he himself would cross the line and break the law, to insure that justice was done.
www.vintagelibrary.com /hardboil.cfm   (639 words)

  
 Hard-Boiled Detectives
These detectives (like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe) were characterized by a mixture of romantic idealism, cynicism, and misogyny.
As with all such definitions, therefore, a good rule of thumb is whenever your impression of the novel doesn't fit the definitions on the list, revise the definitions to fit your experience of the novel, not the other way around.
The detective is usually a loner, with no apparent family, few if any friends, and no stable romantic attachments.
www.nku.edu /~alberti/eng302/hardboiled.html   (464 words)

  
 Thoreau and the Hard Boiled Dick   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
American detective fiction is constructed according to formula and one necessary element of that formula is the code of conduct by which the detective-protagonist measures his behavior in a corrupt and dangerous world.
The quotation is a confession that the code of one of the toughest of the private "dicks" in current hard-boiled detective fiction is in part attributable to Henry Thoreau.
Surely it is worth noting the case with which Thoreau fits into the role of the tough-guy detective as it is currently described by the scholars in the genre.
eserver.org /thoreau/spenser.html   (1787 words)

  
 McFarland - Publisher of Reference and Scholarly Books
The hard-bitten PI with a bottle of bourbon in his desk drawer—it’s an image as old as the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction itself.
This examination of the role of alcohol in hard-boiled detective fiction begins with the genre’s birth, in an era strongly influenced and affected by Prohibition, and follows both the genre’s development and its relation to our changing understanding of and attitudes towards alcohol and alcoholism.
Rita Elizabeth Rippetoe is an independent scholar of genre fiction, with an emphasis on detective fiction.
www.mcfarlandpub.com /book-2.php?isbn=0-7864-1899-0   (205 words)

  
 "Blood and Bone"
It’s not hard to see how this term became attached to this group of detectives.
This is the hard reality that there are consequences when a chair interrupts the natural path of a human head.
But of course, the most important defining characteristic of hard-boiled detective fiction is the detective himself.
www.ascamacho.com /otherworks/hard-boiled.htm   (829 words)

  
 3002L6   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
Within a genre which in general upholds conservative social values our queens of crime have, with few exceptions, been good royalists, often defending a social order in their fiction that is decidedly on the wane if it has not actually disappeared from the real world some decades before.
The hard-boiled detective story has a lot in common with the western--it is an adventure story rather than a puzzle to be solved, and there is plenty of action often erupting in violence.
The similarities between feminist critiques of the legends of Australian bush nationalism and contemporary feminist detective writers rewriting of the codes of detective fiction indicates the importance of the development of feminist knowledges to the contemporary forms of detective writing.
www.usq.edu.au /users/leec/3002L8.htm   (873 words)

  
 Vintage Crime/ Black Lizard
He began writing fiction at a very young age, selling his first story to True Detective when he was only fourteen.
For Tommy Carver, a short-tempered Okie sharecropper penned up in a sweltering cabin with a brutal father and a stepmother whose affection is anything but maternal, the question isn't when he'll explode, but who he'll take with him when he does.
Young, beautiful, and fearfully abused, Mona was the kind of girl even a hard man like Dillon couldn't bring himself to use.
www.randomhouse.com /vintage/blacklizard/catalog/results2.pperl?authorid=30970   (1068 words)

  
 From: Stepsons of Sam: Re-Visions of the Hard-Boiled Detective Formula in Recent American Fiction   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
If the hard-boiled formula converted the city from "object of wonder" in classical detective fiction into an image of modernity, corruption, and death, then these recent revisions have given the screw another turn and have exchanged the existential vision of the hard-hailed formula for an absurdist view of the city.
Significant causes for action are hard to locate in these novels, or when located turn quickly to absurdist mist and mirth.
The formula's demand that the detective become more than a detective is put to the service of plot at this point.
www.eoiweb.com /brautigan/articles/grimes83.htm   (1700 words)

  
 The American Mystery Novel   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
Twists, Slugs and Roscoes: A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang - This may be essential for understanding the works of the hard boiled mystery writers.
Homer is a former police detective who is now a professor of American literature as is his wife.
Borthwick (1923 -) Borthwick's series detective is Sara Deane, a professor of English, and her husband Dr. Alex McKenzie.
www.sldirectory.com /libsf/booksf/mystery/america.html   (1377 words)

  
 Film noir   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
Film noir is a stylistic approach to genre films forged in depression-era detective and gangster movies and hard-boiled detective stories which were a staple of pulp fiction.
Ultimately, the term derived from the name of a long-running series of hard-boiled detective fiction books entitled Série Noire, from the French pattern of naming a series of books after the color of their bindings.
In The Long Goodbye Altman's hard-boiled detective is presented as a hapless bungler who can't help but lose the "moral battle".
www.worldhistory.com /wiki/F/Film-noir.htm   (1033 words)

  
 [No title]   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
To study the early history of hard boiled detective fiction is also to study the history of American popular literature, especially the cheap magazines known as 'pulps'.
Apart from the nameless detective himself, who is fat and fortyish, there are several other operatives in the SF branch of the Continental Detective Agency: Dick Foley, a small Canadian (the ‘shadow ace’) and young Bob Teal who is killed in a manner prefiguring Archer’s death in TMF.
He worked hard at becoming a pulp writer and, as Julian Symons remarks, was self-consciously trying to write literature in a medium which he held in contempt (Symons, 1992: 162).
www.ejmd.mcmail.com /hardboil.htm   (3548 words)

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