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Noir and Hardboiled Mysteries (part 1)
300 Plays2 years ago
Dames, darkness, and detectives. Special guest Frances joins Brook and Sarah to explain the origins and differences of hardboiled and noir fiction. Part 1 of 2.
ResourcesThe Adventures of Philip Marlowe radio dramas
Chandler, Raymond The Big Sleep
Chandler, Raymond (1950). The Simple Art of Murder
Hammett, Dashiell (2013). The Hunter and Other Stories
Works referenced (in order of mention)Carroll John Daly "The False Burton Combs" Black Mask Magazine (1922)
- Black Mask Magazine
- Dime Detective
- Spicy
- Adventure
James M. Cain Double Indemnity (1943)
Micky Spilane
James M. Cain The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934)
Martin Goldsmith Detour (1939)
The Adventures of Philip Marlowe radio dramas
Dashiell Hammett Maltese Falcon (1930)
James Ellroy L.A. Confidential (1990)
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Music: Signs To Nowhere by Shane Ivers - //www.silvermansound.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Noir and Hard-boiled Fiction
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I'm Sarah. And I'm Brooke. And we both love mystery. So Brooke, today we've got a different type of episode. Today, instead of looking at a specific author in depth, we're talking about a subgenre. Or maybe it's actually two subgenres, which I think we'll probably discuss.
Francis Joins the Discussion
00:00:30
Speaker
We're talking about in the mystery space noir and hard-boiled detective fiction.
00:00:36
Speaker
And because neither of us are very familiar with either of those, noir or hard-boiled, we've invited Francis to join us again. Hi, Francis. Hi. Nice to see you guys. And speak with
Francis' Mystery Background
00:00:51
Speaker
you. Nice to see you. Before we get started, I'll just refresh our listeners' memories with a short bio on Francis.
00:01:00
Speaker
Frances has read mysteries since she was four. After some teaching, she opened the mystery bookshop Chronicles of Crime 22 years ago. She also writes crime fiction and the first books in two series set in 1935 based in San Francisco are with an agent. Thanks again for joining us, Frances. Thank you for having me.
00:01:23
Speaker
So I'm really pleased that you've joined us because for me, at least, this is part of the mystery genre that I'm really unfamiliar with. I can name maybe a couple of authors and a couple of their works that would fit in there, but I really appreciate you coming to provide some insight today. I think this will be a fun conversation.
00:01:52
Speaker
It's hard boiled and noir, there's a very fine line within the descriptors of both. And as I said, as we were chatting, this all has to do with vocabulary with words and the etymology of words. So as I held up to you when we were first chatting,
00:02:13
Speaker
It's going to start with an egg. Interesting.
Origins of Noir and Hard-boiled Genres
00:02:17
Speaker
Maybe we could start by just talking about what makes that difference between noir and hard-boiled. Well, hard-boiled came first in the 1920s. The term noir was never used until the 40s when film noir came about. And that was through a French film critic who saw American films changing and becoming very dark.
00:02:42
Speaker
Well, let's backtrack to hardboiled. The term came about by, it was used by Mark Twain in an essay that he wrote in 1886 for, uh, the essay was called, oh, it was a speech that he, he, an essay on a speech that he wrote about Ulysses grant. It was all about Grant's vocabulary that he used because he was trying to rile people up and get things going.
00:03:11
Speaker
And Twain said Grant's use of the English language was hard-boiled, hidebound grammar. And Twain likened changes in literature or changes in people as being like a hard-boiled egg because they became harsher, tougher, and wouldn't put up with things. And that is where hard-boiled came from.
00:03:40
Speaker
And then in World War I, the drill sergeants were called hard-boiled. And the people that were in training were good eggs. See how it all grows. And then in the slangs it became, in the 20s, in the United States, it became a slang word to call somebody hard-boiled. They were the tough guy on the street, the one you wanted to avoid.
Pioneers of Hard-boiled Fiction
00:04:09
Speaker
So at this same time, Black Mask magazine had come out and you have to think about early pulp. A lot of it was adventure stories, spicy stories. Uh, Westerns, Westerns were huge and has an enormous connection to hard boiled fiction because the hard boiled guys were the Cowboys riding around in the open West.
00:04:38
Speaker
There were bank robberies and you name it, whatever else. And they were the hard-boiled characters of Western fiction. And then Black Mask accepted a few stories in the 20s. And one of them was by Carol John Daly.
00:05:01
Speaker
And he I'm going to read you the opening line he had because this was what I call a one off. So it wasn't going to be featured as a as a series character. So the story is by daily. It's published in Black Mask May 15th, 1923, and it's called Three Gun Terry. And the opening is I have a little office which says Terry Mask, private investigator on the on the door.
00:05:29
Speaker
which means whatever you wish to think it. I ain't a crook and I ain't a dick. I play the game on the level in my own way." Now we have a different vocabulary that has been established. So after that, he liked the way all of that sounded. The story was very popular in Black Mask, but then he developed a character shortly after that. So June of 23, it comes out, of Grace Williams.
00:05:57
Speaker
And Race Williams is considered the first hard-boiled detective. And he writes it in a similar manner to that. He's a gun-toting private detective that has high morals, but he has to sometimes break little snippets of the law, shall we say, in order to
00:06:24
Speaker
save the person that is in trouble and to uncover the mystery. So he is, in fact, the first hard-boiled detective. Most people think it's Dashiell Hammett. Daly wrote over 50 Race Williams short stories. They became books. He's kind of dropped out of sight because Hammett and Chandler sort of began to take over. Hammett wrote about three months later a story in Black Mask. It was more literary than Race Williams. So that's
00:06:54
Speaker
probably partly why Hammett is thought of as more of a writer, but Race Williams was more prolific. Yeah, because I did read a little bit about Hammett. And he, unlike some of the other authors that we've looked at, he wasn't as prolific as them. And he wrote a lot of short stories, I think, but not as many novels. And his writing was in a relatively limited period of time that he was publishing. Yeah.
00:07:24
Speaker
And you only wrote five novels, yeah. But most people think that Hammett is the father of the hard-boiled genre, because it is, as you said, a subgenre of mystery, and it's a huge one.
00:07:38
Speaker
Mm hmm. Well, and so it's interesting that it emerged around the time that I get the Christie was publishing. Yeah, exactly. Her earlier stories. Right. And so is there she was publishing in the UK and hard boiled emerged from the U.S. Is that is there any significance to that? There's a huge significance to it because hard boiled fought back at that smooth golden age sort of style where everything was perfect.
00:08:09
Speaker
And you have to think about the times in the United States, they were entering the depression. Prohibition lasted for 13 years from the 1920s to 34. So things were very dark for people.
Hard-boiled as a Response to Its Era
00:08:23
Speaker
They had no jobs. There were bread lineups and, and they, these authors who were writing the pulps just felt that there wasn't, nobody was talking about real people.
00:08:37
Speaker
They weren't living in manor houses. They weren't. And so it was a real fight back at Golan age and they sold extraordinarily well. If race Williams's name appeared on the cover of black mask, they would sell out of the publication. So people enjoy it and it took them away into a whole other kind of, um, more realistic side of things.
00:09:05
Speaker
So that's the biggest thing about, it's a response to the golden age of crime fiction and there's a place for both.
00:09:17
Speaker
Well, and it's interesting that Hardboiled, it kind of reflected what was happening in life, right? Where it was darker and more realistic. Whereas myself as a reader, like when things are tough, I'd rather read something that is lighter. Well, during COVID, most of the things I sold were Golden Age mysteries.
00:09:42
Speaker
I would be selling 30 copies of Agatha Christie a day, easily. Nio Marsh and, you know, they wanted comfort. They would read Rex Stout as an American author. So during when all that, the height of the pandemic, they were going back to people that they knew and not the sort of the Scandinavian stuff, which I would sell all the time. I maybe sold 20 Scandi books during the two year height of things.
Pulp Magazines and Resources
00:10:12
Speaker
Yeah. I know you're surprised. That's a whole other conversation. Wow. Yeah. Maybe we could talk a little bit more about, um, the magazines that, um, uh, the black mask. And I know there were, you mentioned. And dime detective and spicy and adventure. There were tons of them and there's a really brilliant website that has a lot of them available for you to read.
00:10:41
Speaker
which is on internetarchive.org. And you can go, it's a huge research site, but they have a lot of the pulp magazines and you can go through and read the stuff and it's fabulous and see the covers and the artwork and all that kind of stuff. They're also very visual. They had brilliant artists who did the covers.
00:11:01
Speaker
Yeah, I was looking at some of them and yeah, they're really incredible. And I was looking, I was interested to learn about the spicy. Yeah. There's some great stories in there. Those. Yeah. And, you know, the- And they're pretty risque.
00:11:18
Speaker
Very. Yes. Yes. I was reading this kind of analysis of how this plucky girl found herself in these situations where, oops, her underclothes came off all of a sudden. Yep. Well, some Chandler stuff can be a bit racy the way he talks about women. Yeah, yeah. I haven't posted any of those ones.
00:11:45
Speaker
I think that's a difference that we've seen from the Golden Age as well, where they really bring in the sexy aspect where you don't see that at all in the Golden Age. Yeah. They're more uptight in the Golden Age. It's rare that someone loses their undergarments.
00:12:03
Speaker
if it ever happened in the Golden Age. And I read an essay by Chandler where he is really critical of the Golden Age. He was very critical of it. Yes, like almost snarky in his criticism. He could be. He could be snarky about anything. He was an interesting character because
00:12:32
Speaker
He, um, it was very prolific in his short stories. Um, and he also wrote, like many of the hardboiled writers wrote screenplays for Hollywood. And that's really where they made their money. Uh, and, and a lot of them drank a lot, like a lot. I know there was one book Chandler couldn't finish. And so they locked him in a room or a screenplay.
00:13:00
Speaker
They locked him in a room with a bunch of scotch and let him go at it. And they often wrote the screenplays for other hardboiled or noir writers. So James M. Kane's Double Indemnity is written by Raymond Chandler. It's basically word for word out of the book for the film, except for the last 20 pages of the book, Chandler changed the ending in the film. So it's you could sit and read the book and watch the movie.
00:13:30
Speaker
And then he changed the last 20 pages. It's totally different ending. It's quite a shock compared to what the book is more shocking than, and I think makes more sense than the film, but that's my opinion on that.
00:13:44
Speaker
Interesting. And so then just thinking about, you know, that film was really kind of coming into popularity and at the time that these guys were writing those screenplays. So they clearly had quite an influence on what was being produced at the time.
00:14:08
Speaker
Yeah, and it depends what the studio wanted as well, right? So they were looking for things that were popular, what characters were liked, and a lot of it is hard-boiled stuff. And again, the films of the time began reflecting the period that they were going through of historically the period. So coming out of prohibition, coming out of
00:14:38
Speaker
Well, World War I first, then prohibition. And then I mean, there were hundreds, thousands of movies being made in Hollywood. It's an area that is fascinating. And then they moved into so then you get the depression that really mucked things up. And so they're they're reflecting so much. That's where film noir comes in. They reflect so much of that gritty side of things. So that that was that
00:15:08
Speaker
term came into being when a French critic saw a bunch of American films and wrote an article on them and said how noir they were, how black they were. So it was really Europe that coined the the whole mood of noir. Right. And so that's why it's a fine line between the two, because hardboiled books
00:15:37
Speaker
have all of those elements in them. Often the noir books are standalones.
Themes in Noir Fiction
00:15:45
Speaker
They're not necessarily carried on, but you could argue that Chandler and Hammett fall into both categories, as does Mickey Spillane, and they're all edgy. So similarities between the two, there's violence in both, sexual overtones in both,
00:16:06
Speaker
They have a rough, edgy, gritty tone in both, and their character development in both is amazing. So if you read noir fiction and you're looking at something like James M. Kane's Postman Always Rings Twice, that, so he wrote that in 34, and that's about a guy
00:16:36
Speaker
who's walks into a roadside diner. And he's looking for some work. So again, let's put that in with the depression perspective, he just shows up. And, of course, the wife is of the owner of the diner comes in and she's a hot number. And the husband is older. And then they she is the femme fatale. And
00:17:06
Speaker
coerces him to kill her husband and so that they can get insurance money and escape their dreadful life. And there's always a sap and there's always a femme fatale in noir. That's one of the differences. Yet you empathize with the sap because he's usually just fallen into an unfortunate circumstance. You know it isn't going to end well
00:17:36
Speaker
There's no way. Detour is a brilliant film where a fellow's driving along the road or is hitchhiking and he gets into a car that this guy picks him up on and accidentally the fellow who owns the car dies. And it's the other fellow driving, the hitchhiker.
00:18:01
Speaker
He dies and it's all on the up and up, but the fellow is worried about it. He takes the car, he hides the body, he takes the car, he goes off and he meets this woman who he picks up to give a ride and it's downhill from there for him. There is no way that he can get out of that situation. And she's a bad person.
00:18:26
Speaker
I find a lot of similarities in those films and those setups in like a Shakespeare tragedy. Like you know that the minute that the play starts that it's all going to go wrong. It's going to be, you know, a tragic ending. Everyone's going to die or at least psychological death. So that's kind of in my mind how I separate the strictly noir stuff is it feels like kind of one of those tragic plays. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. There's nothing good that
00:18:56
Speaker
Nobody does well in noir film. And so, so the definition of noir fiction is constantly changing, whereas hard boiled is more static. And it constantly changes because
00:19:19
Speaker
The protagonists are constantly changing and evolving. So we have modern noir films that are done. And they're very different from the early noir films. But the main thing is that morally, there's not much there. Nothing good anyway. There's someone who has turned someone into something else. So everybody has the possibility to commit a crime. It depends on your morals.
00:19:50
Speaker
And if you're down and out, sometimes you just can't alter that. And that's the noir, that's the flaw of the characters in noir.
Moral Complexities in Noir and Hard-boiled
00:20:00
Speaker
Now in, and the other thing is that actually they both do use is the backdrop of noir and hard boiled is always a gritty setting. It's always dark. It's always sort of mean streets.
00:20:19
Speaker
And Chandler was excellent at, so in his opening of The Big Sleep, he was excellent in describing himself and what he was wearing. It's in the first paragraph, it's considered one of the best opening paragraphs, whether you consider it hard-boiled or noir. And he describes what he's wearing and he's looking quite natty and he goes into this house
00:20:46
Speaker
that has an enormous tapestry of nights and the night is saving a woman with long hair and he describes it and he describes how he felt like he was dressed like a million bucks because he had to act the part in order to get the job from this wealthy guy. And then everything goes downhill for him and the person he's supposed to be helping.
00:21:13
Speaker
who can't help herself. She doesn't know what to do. She's into drugs, that kind of thing. And so they both noir and hard-boiled talk about very gritty subjects. They're talking drugs. They're talking blackmail. They're talking out and out murder for often not necessarily great reasons, right? I mean, no murder is for a great reason, but just saying that they've chosen to be
00:21:42
Speaker
topics that, yes, murder in the golden age, and yes, people used opium sometimes. I mean, there's Sherlock and an opium den or whatever, but it wasn't for the sake of monetary gain for the individual. And that's often something that you see. It's done for money. It's done for insurance money in noir, lots of insurance scams and things like that that they're trying to do.
00:22:12
Speaker
And the other feature is, I mean, the whole thing is morals in both. Noir fiction, morally, the person is compromised. And he can't see right from wrong. He gets so down a drain. Dennis Lehane had a great quote where he said that in noir fiction, the character falls off the curb into the gutter. In hard boiled, you're much more upstanding, even though you do things that
00:22:41
Speaker
may have questionable morals. It's for justice and to right the world again. So you can't stoop that low to roll off into a gutter. Whereas in noir, you just do.
Witty Dialogue in Both Genres
00:22:54
Speaker
The other thing about both is their dialogue. It's very sharp, snappy, witty. In the Maltese Falcon, Hamlet wrote the Maltese Falcons, but he says the main character who's the bad character says,
00:23:10
Speaker
You always have a very smooth explanation for everything. And Sam Spade, Hammett's character, replies, what do you want me to do? Learn to stutter. And so it's very snappy in The Thin Man. I love this quote. The main character says, the problem of putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four and sometimes you get 22. So he uses
00:23:37
Speaker
and instead of plus, right? It's just that way that it turns your thinking on a dime by hearing these very simple things. Hard-boiled stuff often has humor in it. Noir has very little humor because the characters are too compromised and bleak.
00:24:00
Speaker
Yeah, I really enjoy all the fun similes in the hard-boiled stories. You find yourself laughing out loud a lot. And one that I wrote down was, as cold and dry as yesterday's toast to describe the weather. That was just so great. They just grab you. It's the visual. Chandler's very visual.
00:24:24
Speaker
And great for radio. Oh, yeah, there were tons that were serialized. So that website, Internet Archive, has tons of old time radio shows on it. And you can just go through all the crime shows or the comedies or whatever, but it's excellent to be able to listen to them.
00:24:42
Speaker
I listened to a couple of radio shows of Philip Marlow's mysteries by Chandler and I really enjoyed them. They were fun. And you hear that's the snappy dialogue, you get that. And when he writes about the Santa Ana winds, you can feel the blowing and the sand and just everything twirling.
00:25:11
Speaker
Right around because there's something coming up. Yes, you know what's going to happen and and that's suspenseful in in so that he's always they're always looking for something to
00:25:26
Speaker
to make good on. A PI or a hard-boiled character often, you know, the person fires them or they die or something like that that's hired them, and that PI will continue to bring justice for that person, whereas there's not much justice in noir.
Noir's Influence on Film
00:25:43
Speaker
There are police procedurals that were done that were noir, but they're usually dirty cops.
00:25:48
Speaker
That's that shows to what took place in the time. I was trying to describe to my husband what what we were going to be talking about. And I gave him the example of L.A. Confidential. Yes, that's very noir. And it's part of Elroy's quartet that he that he wrote. And he's he's very edgy, very dark. His biography, Elroy's biography is very hard to read.
00:26:18
Speaker
but excellent, hard to read in that it's so dark because he had a dark upbringing and that his mother had died very much in the way of the Black Dahlia. And so it was, I think that colored him to see things in a darkness. He's a brilliant writer, but you have to be in the right state of mind. And the film, LA Confidential, was excellent. It portrayed exactly what Noir is. So Brooke, we're going to pause the conversation with Francis here.
00:26:48
Speaker
Yeah, that was just a great conversation with Francis. I had no idea we were going to learn so much. Um, and I'm just excited cause there's even more to come. Thank you for listening.
Conclusion and Feedback
00:26:59
Speaker
We'd love to hear your feedback. You can reach us at hello at colludinmystery.com or on Instagram at colludinmystery. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating or a review or telling a friend to help spread the word.
00:27:12
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Clued In Mystery. I'm Brooke. And I'm Sarah. And we both love mystery. Clued In Mystery is produced by Brooke Peterson and Sarah M. Stephen. Music is by Shane Ivers at Silvermansound.com. Visit us online at CluedInMystery.com or social media at Clued In Mystery. If you liked what you heard, please consider subscribing, leaving a review, or telling your friends.