Hard-boiled detective

Hard-boiled detective fiction sets the scene for a cold and harsh reality. Dashiell Hammett’s, “The Girl with The Silver Eyes” is no exception to this rule. In this short story Hammett paints a picture of a brutally realistic urban center filled with characters that not many people would want to call friends. The realistic qualities of Hammett’s story are drawn from his own life’s experience working as a Pinkerton detective. The detective in “The Girl With The Silver Eyes” works for the Continental

women were expected to be feminine, meek and powerless. In Marele Day’s novel, she utilises this subversion of women to challenge society’s perception of gender stereotypes. Day introduces Claudia Valentine as the conventional tough, masculine hard-boiled detective “the black suit was hanging in the wardrobe neatly pressed”, however, later reveals her to be a woman, and the ‘blond’ a male one night stand. Thus, challenging the idea that women are subpar to men by displaying women as strong, capable of

Mickey Spillane Mickey Spillane, the inventor of a hard-boiled private eye known as Mike Hammer, forever impacted the style and content of detective stories. Mickey Spillane has sold many of his books due to his ability to advertise to a majority audience: Men who recently recovered from a violent war. He was born March 9th, 1918 in Brooklyn, New York. Mr. Spillane was raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey by his scottish mother and irish bartender father. He was married three times and barely raised

The Golden Age of detective fiction refers to both specific sub-genre and (the cozy) and the historical period (the interwar years) (James, 2009). It is loosely defined as a soft-boiled detective fiction released between the two wars (World War 1 and World War 2). The Golden age of detective fiction was arguably caused by the interwar period (James, 2009). This paper seeks to discuss, with references to the fictions of Agatha Christie and other canonical Golden Age texts, why the Detection fiction

In the gritty world of crime fiction, a detective must be prepared to face any number of gruesome and impossible challenges that come with living in the traditional urban landscape. One of the most difficult challenges is the detective’s never ending fight to keep control in a chaotic society, and a serious threat to that authority is the ever dangerous temptation of the women in his life. Crime fiction uses a division of female sexuality to take power from the women of the novel and give it to the

Thank you for the opportunity to submit my novel to Hard Case Crime. I love the hard-boiled style of your website and the enthusiasm for interest in different eras of crime novels. I think my novel HUNTER’S OF THE BLOOD MOON is a perfect match for Hard Case Crime enthusiasts. From a star college athlete turned junkie, Dyanna Montarro’s world was marred in turmoil, but now she was ready to storm back. With the support from her fiancé and the help of her best friend, Dyanna resurrects the courage

Similes in The Big Sleep      In response to Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, I have just one question. Why all the similes? There isn't a single page in the novel that doesn't display this annoying literary device. Everything is "like this" or "like that." It never ends! Similar to decoding a secret message that isn't difficult to understand, but nevertheless tiring due to the overwhelming amount of messages, the novel is frustrating to read. The following analysis acknowledges Chandler's

Both Dashiell Hammett’s development of Sam Spade in the Maltese Falcon and Dorothy Sayers development of Harriet Vane in Gaudy Night, leave something to be said about the way British and American detective novels create their characters in line with different views of life. Whether that perspective is relative to the time period and country, or just the views of the author, it is clear that the American “hardboiled” novel focuses strongly on the self-interest of most of the characters, and the self-development

How to Write Noir Fiction The Merriam-Webster Dictionary (n.d) defines noir as “crime fiction featuring hard-boiled[,] cynical characters and bleak[,] sleazy settings.” However, it could be suggested that “claustrophobic” would be a better descriptor, in place of “sleazy.” The term noir, as it relates to fiction, comes from “film noir,” which means “black cinema,” and was a term coined in France by French critic Nino Frank (Schurr, A., Crump, A., Rozeman, M., & Paste staff, 2015). The dark term was

Crime detective mysteries have captivated readers for years. Throughout time, the stories have evolved in many directions, developing many different variations and adaptations of the traditional murder mystery stories that had been told before. With subgenres such as police procedural, thriller, hard boiled, cozy, amateur detective, professional private detective, and forensic mysteries, there are so many different ways that a murder mystery can be told. The book, The Coroner’s Lunch, falls into