‘The Luxury to Worry about Justice’: Hard-boiled Style and Heroism

Abstract

Even though it covers a wide and varied scope of literary enterprise, the hard-boiled (sub)genre is frequently viewed as if it was the gift of its ‘brand leaders’, Hammett, Chandler and Macdonald. Its chief feature is usually said to be a special clipped and laconic prose style thought to be appropriate to depicting the hard realities of the modern world. Derived from journalism, American literary naturalism and the work of Hemingway, this style developed in America between the wars as a kind of ‘pure’ prose, an almost transparent vehicle for the reporting of ‘objective’ facts. Yet hard-boiled style has also been viewed as inextricably tied to a highly specific world-view. Willett (1992) and Marcus (1975) both see the hard-boiled genre in terms of its heroes’ attempts to deconstruct and ‘defictionalise’ the ‘reality’ created by the personally interested voices of those they encounter. The version of ‘reality’ which the hero submits subsequent to this deconstruction, however, is ‘no more definitive or scientific than the discourses presented to him’ (Willett 1992, p. 10). Furthermore, the hard-boiled hero’s role in reaching a moment of truth often explicitly ‘renders universal principles of truth and justice subjective and presages moral inquiry as the detective’s singular response to the atomised urban scenes of modernity’ (Kennedy 1997, p. 44).