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Hardboiled Crime Fiction

  • Hardboiled Coffee Problems

    You know something? It wasn’t so bad having a cup of coffee with her. I mean this was the first time we were alone together and she had a very sweet way about her. But what the hell, I had my own problems. (cf. The Best of Manhunt 2 (p. 398). Stark House Press. Kindle Read more

  • SHORT STORY REVIEW: “As I Lay Dead” by Fletcher Flora

    I have mentioned here before that Noir and Hardboiled fiction are my guilty pleasures. The tough, cynical protagonists, the fast-paced, action oriented plots, the tone, the dialog, and the style all appeal to me in a way that no other fiction really does. Manhunt first appeared in 1952. According to information Here is some information Read more

  • Friday’s Food for Thought: On Dashiell Hammett

    In his famous 1944 essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler openly acknowledged Hammett’s genius. He properly credited him as “the ace performer,” the one writer responsible for the creation and development of the hard-boiled school of literature, the genre’s revolutionary realist. “He took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into Read more

  • Book Review: “Find a Victim” by Ross Macdonald

    I first read Ross Macdonald in the late 80s or early 90s, after reading a lot of Hammett and Chandler. It was a natural progression. For as many have pointed out, Macdonald perfected the hardboiled detective  genre that Hammett invented and Chandler made literarily necessary. The protagonist of Ross Macdonald’s Southern California Noir work is Read more