INTRODUCTIONS AND DEFINITIONS

By Jim Doherty

This is what would have been the first entry in this column had the passing of a giant like Mickey Spillane not intervened. I Like ‘Em Tough is a column on crime fiction in the “hard-boiled” or “noir” categories. So, before we get started, I thought I'd tell you a bit about myself, and define our terms, so we'd all know what we meant when we said “hard-boiled” or “noir.”

By vocation, I'm a cop, with over a decade's experience in American law enforcement at the federal, state, and local levels. By avocation, I'm a writer. A professional writer to the degree that I get paid for it more often than not, but not to the degree that I'm able to make a living at it. I've had two books published, so far. Just the Facts – True Tales of Cops & Criminals (Deadly Serious, 2004) is a collection of true-crime articles, one of which, “Blood for Oil,” won a Spur award from the Western Writers of America. Raymond Chandler – Master of American Noir (Barnes & Noble, 2004) is an e-book consisting of a series of lectures about Chandler 's early work used in conjunction with an on-line course on the subject offered, occasionally, on Barnes & Noble's website.

All of my published fiction pieces have been short stories, most of them police procedurals featuring a character named Dan Sullivan, one of which, “Stench,” appeared in the last issue of Mysterical-E . Sullivan's also the main character of my completed, but still unpublished novel, An Obscure Grave , a finalist in the Debut Dagger competition conducted by the British Crime Writers Association. Aside from the Sullivan series, I've also written some private eye stories and some westerns.

In real life, I work in a tough profession, and, as writer, both of fiction and of critical material on the genre, I've tended to specialize in or gravitate to the grittier, tougher side of the street.

So much for my qualifications. Now, what the hell do we mean when we say a crime story is “hard-boiled” or “noir?” Are they synonymous terms? Are they mutually exclusive? Do they have anything to do with each other at all?

We'll take up “hard-boiled” first, since it made its way into the language first.

“Hard-boiled,” of course, literally describes a piece of food, almost invariably an egg, that's been boiled so long that it become tough and hard.

The earliest instance of a metaphorical use I've been able to find is from 1886, when Mark Twain used it to describe hidebound, rigid grammatical rules.

It seems to have come into common use sometime during the First World War, when US military recruits commonly used it to describe professional non-coms assigned to drill instructor duty, who, faced with the Herculean task of turning hundreds of thousands of just plain citizens into citizen-soldiers, came across as unrelentingly tough and unsentimental.

Why use a term like “hard-boiled” to describe a particular kind of person? Speculating, I would guess that it was an extension of the term, common at the time, “good egg,” which meant roughly the same thing as “nice guy.” Hence a guy who wasn't so nice, a tough guy, might be described as a “hard-boiled egg.” That seems likely, but, as I say, it's speculation.

After the war, roughly coincident with the common use of the term to describe tough, apparently unsentimental individuals, pulp magazines started to make their mark on American fiction. There were pulps that catered to readers of almost every genre, from westerns to war stories, from science fiction to swashbucklers.

Mysteries that were published in the pulps began, early on, to take on a different style than those that were appearing in other publications. Like the paper they were printed on, pulp mysteries were rough, written in a vernacular style, with lots of action and violence right on stage, in sharp contrast to the more traditional mysteries written by authors like Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers in Britain, or S.S. Van Dine in the States.

Different terms were used to describe this new style of mystery, the “action detective story,” the “the Black Mask school” (for the magazine most identified with the style), the “the realist school” (though many of the stories weren't very realistic at all). Early on, the term that caught on and stuck was “hard-boiled.” Years later, when former Black Mask editor Joseph T. Shaw assembled an anthology of the best stories from his tenure with the magazine and called it The Hard-Boiled Omnibus (Simon & Schuster, 1946), the dye had been cast.

Black Mask was widely considered the best magazine publishing this kind of story, but it was far from the only one. Competitors like Dime Detective and Detective Fiction Weekly were regarded as top publications, too. And there were literally dozens of lesser lights competing for newsstand space.

The private eye is the figure many of us commonly associate with the hard-boiled mystery, characters like Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, or Carroll John Daly's Race Williams, all of whom debuted in the pages of Black Mask . But private eyes were not the only kind of hard-boiled sleuth the pulps offered up.

There were newspapermen like George Harmon Coxe's Jack Casey, spies like Max Brand's Anthony Hamilton, cops like MacKinlay Kantor's Nick and Dave Glennon, and lawyers like Erle Stanley Gardner's Ken Corning (an early prototype for his most famous character, Perry Mason). There were even hard-boiled amateur sleuths who managed to take time out from whatever they actually did for a living to regularly solve crimes. Frank Gruber's Oliver Quade, for example, was a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, and John K. Butler's Steve Midnight was a cab driver.

But whatever the profession of the protagonist, what all the stories had in common was a tough attitude and a colloquial style. So, essentially, a hard-boiled crime story is a story with that's tough and colloquial.

“Tough,” in this context, doesn't just mean capable. Sherlock Holmes, who routinely faced down the worst of London 's criminal element, was capable. Lord Peter was a combat veteran of the Great War. Hercule Poirot was a policeman legendary in law enforcement circles before retiring to private practice. They were all capable, but the “hard-boiled” mystery was a reaction to, and to a degree, against the kind of story Holmes, Wimsey, and Poirot appeared in. “Tough,” then, carries with it the sense of, not just being capable, or even street-smart, but of being of the street, at home on the street, of being one of the common men, however uncommonly competent.

Which brings us to “colloquial.” Because the style the stories were told in was just as important as the attitude with which they were told. It wasn't the formal English of Conan Doyle or Christie. It was the way ordinary people talked. Colorful, and vernacular, natural for the kind of story it was used in.

Raymond Chandler, describing Hammett's depiction of the crime-fighters and criminals who inhabit his fiction, said, “He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes .” (Emphasis mine).

Chandler , born in the US but raised and educated in Britain , was fascinated by American language, and by Hammett's rare gift with it. Intrigued by the possibilities of this new style, he actually compiled a glossary of American slang to make sure his use of it was accurate when he set out to emulate Hammett.

So, if “hard-boiled” means “tough and colloquial,” what's “noir?”

Again, to use the literal meaning, “noir” is French for “black.” The root of its use to describe a particular kind of crime story is lot easier to determine than “hard-boiled.”

Right after World War II, editor Marcel Duhamel started a mystery line for the French publisher Gallimard, consisting primarily of translations of American novels, called Serie Noir . The term could be interpreted in two ways. First, of course, a series of crime novels noteworthy for their particularly dark subject matter. However, “un serie noir,” or “a black series,” is also a French figure of speech meaning, roughly, a run of bad luck, so the title of Gallimard's new mystery line not only described the kind of novels that would appear under its logo, but suggested, through its humorous double meaning, what the characters in the novels were in for.

There's a belief among some that if a novel is noir, it can't be hard-boiled, and vice-versa. Hard-boiled is about surviving and triumphing over adversity, so the argument goes, while noir is about inevitable doom.

Yet, looking at the earliest entries in the Serie Noir line, we see books by writers like Hammett, Chandler , W.R. Burnett, and others whose hard-boiled credentials are unassailable.

So clearly the people who coined the term to describe a particular kind of mystery didn't mean it to describe something other than, and exclusive of, hard-boiled. Indeed, the first hundred or so books to appear under the label were almost all either American or American-style hard-boiled novels.

Eventually, though, other kinds of books started to appear, novels that weren't exactly hard-boiled, but which were too edgy and tense to be described as “cozy.” Books by psychological suspense specialists like Elisabeth Sanxay Holding (a writer Chandler greatly admired), Stanton Forbes, Mildred Davis, and E.V. Cunningham.

So if the books published under the Serie Noir label weren't necessarily hard-boiled, but weren't necessarily not hard-boiled, what did they all have in common.

Well, it's difficult to nail down what they all have in common. Over the last sixty years or so, around 3000 books have been published as part of the Serie Noir . I'm pretty widely read, but even I haven't read every single Serie Noir novel ever published.

But, as near as I've been able to determine, based on those books I am familiar with, what they all seem to have in common is a tone, a sense of foreboding, what Chandler called “the smell of fear.” If “hard-boiled” is about attitude and style, then “noir” seems to be about atmosphere. A dark, sinister atmosphere.

So, despite what you might read elsewhere, “noir,” according to the people who first coined the term, and according to the way it's most commonly used now, isn't about things like doomed characters or nihilistic plots. Not per se. Obviously, certain kinds of characters, and certain kinds of plot situations, will lend themselves to a particular kind of dark, sinister treatment. Clearly, such characters, and situations, and plots will contribute to the atmosphere of the story.

But “noir,” to the degree that it describes anything that we can put our finger on, doesn't describe those characters or those plots so much as the dark, sinister kind of atmosphere that such characters and plots support.

In other words, noir's about atmosphere, and that's really all it's about.

So, to recap, if it's tough and colloquial, it's hard-boiled.

If it's dark and sinister, it's noir.

If it's tough and colloquial, and dark and sinister, it's both hard-boiled and noir.