Used: Westerns > Pulp Fiction: Hardboiled
Started in the 1920s and perfected in the 1930s, the hard boiled detective was one of the most popular forms to arise from the pulp fiction magazines.
The hard boiled detective was a character who had to live on the mean streets of the city where fighting, drinking, swearing, poverty and death were all part of life. This new type of detective had to balance the day to day needs of survival against the desire to uphold the law and assist justice. Living in the toughest of environments, and required to be tougher than the evil surrounding him, our new heroes had to become "hard boiled".
In this new world, the hard boiled detective began to administer a new form of justice where if need be, he himself would cross the line and break the law, to insure that justice was done. Our hero was thrust into a world where he had to choose between different levels of evil and no one was truely on the side of good. His survival often depended upon a shoot first, ask questions later approach where the ability to reason out a murder is less important than the ability to fight one's way out of a jam.
This ushered in a new era of action packed detective stories where the murder no longer took place off stage and instead took place all around our hero on an ongoing basis. In some respects, the hard boiled detective was in response to the rising crime and gangster activety caused by Prohibition and then the Great Depression. But once Carroll John Daly introduced us to Race Williams, and Dashiell Hammett introduced us to Sam Spade, the world of detective fiction changed forever.
Don't miss our Film Noir section. Also, our Mystery/Detective section under Old Time Radio.
List by Title
- A Century of Noir:Thirty Two Classic Crime Stories
- A Comprehensive Index to Black Mask, 1920-1951 by E. R. Hagemann
- American Pulp
- At The Stroke of Midnight by John K. Butler
- Dan Turner -- Hollywood Detective # 1 by Robert Leslie Bellem
- Fade to Blonde by Max Phillips
- Fallen Angels by Chandler Thompson Woolrich & More!
- Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler
- Footprints On A Brain by D. L. Champion
- Hard Boiled
- Hard Guy by James Lawson
- Hardboiled in Hollywood by David Wilt
- High Adventure #64: Gun Molls
- History of Mystery by Max Allan Collins
- Hollywood Troubleshooter: The Bill Lennox Stories by W.T. Ballard
- Murder From The East by Carroll John Daly
- Oxford Book American Detectives by Tony Hillerman
- Pulp Masters
- Reckoning in Red by Robert Leslie Bellem
- Replica: Black Mask June 1923 by Black Mask
- Reprint: The Black Mask #2
- The Big Knockover by Dashiell Hammett
- The Heat's On by Chester Himes
- The High Window by Raymond Chandler
- The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
- The Mammoth Book of Pulp Action
- The Mike Hammer Collection Volume #1 by Mickey Spillane
- The Mike Hammer Collection Volume #2 by Mickey Spillane
- The Quires Matter: A McGowan For Hire Mystery by Roger Torrey
- The Snarl of the Beast (Paperback) by Carroll John Daly
- Used: The Hardboiled Dicks by Anthology
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