Hardboiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 019510353X ISBN 13: 9780195103533

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1997

Synopsis

What are the ingredients of a hard-boiled detective story? "Savagery, style, sophistication, sleuthing and sex," said Ellery Queen. Often a desperate blond, a jealous husband, and, of course, a tough-but-tender P.I. the likes of Sam Spade or Philop Marlowe. Perhaps Raymond Chandler summed it up best in his description of Dashiell Hammett's style: "Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it....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."

Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories is the largest and most comprehensive collection of its kind, with over half of the stories never published before in book form. Included are thirty-six sublimely suspenseful stories that chronicle the evolutiuon of this quintessentially American art form, from its earliest beginnings during the Golden Age of the legendary pulp magazine Black Mask in the 1920s, to the arrival of the tough digest Manhunt in the 1950s, and finally leading up to present-day hard-boiled stories by such writers as James Ellroy. Here are eight decades worth of the best writing about betrayal, murder, and mayhem: from Hammett's 1925 tour de force "The Scorched Face," in which the disappearance of two sisters leads Hammett's never-named detective, the Continental Op, straight into a web of sexual blackmail amidst the West Coast elite, to Ed Gorman's 1992 "The Long Silence After," a gripping and powerful rendezvous involving a middle class insurance executive, a Chicago streetwalker, and a loaded .38. Other delectable contributions include "Brush Fire" by James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raymond Chandler's "I'll Be Waiting," where, for once, the femme fatale is not blond but a redhead, a Ross Macdonald mystery starring Macdonald's most famous creation, the cryptic Lew Archer, and "The Screen Test of Mike Hammer" by the one and only Micky Spillane. The hard-boiled cult has more in common with the legendary lawmen of the Wild West than with the gentleman and lady sleuths of traditional drawing room mysteries, and this direct line of descent is on brilliant display in two of the most subtle and tautly written stories in the collection, Elmore Leonard's "3:10 to Yuma" and John D. MacDonald's "Nor Iron Bars." Other contributors include Evan Hunter (better known as Ed McBain), Jim Thompson, Helen Nielsen, Margaret Maron, Andrew Vachss, Faye Kellerman, and Lawrence Block.

Compellingly and compulsively readable, Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories is a page-turner no mystery lover will want to be without. Containing many notable rarities, it celebrates a genre that has profoundly shaped not only American literature and film, but how we see our heroes and oursleves.

About this title

About the Author

Bill Pronzini is a well-known mystery and suspense writer of over forty novels, and is best known as the creator of the "Nameless Detective" series. He served as the first president of the Private Eye Writers of America, and won that organization's Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987. Jack Adrian is an authority on popular and genre fiction in the twentieth century, and is the author of many books, and editor and co-editor of numerous anthologies, including Crime at Christmas, The Art of the Impossible, and The Oxford Book of Historical Stories.

From Booklist

If jazz is America's contribution to music, then hard-boiled crime fiction is its literary equivalent. These 36 selections represent the best of the genre's short form. The editors, both well respected in the field, have included plenty of big names but also have chosen some less famous but very talented writers. The pieces are arranged chronologically, and the editors provide concise literary biographies for each contributor. Among the most famous names are Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson. Surprise entries include Elmore Leonard's western story "3:10 to Yuma." A western? Read it, and you'll understand why you don't need neon lights to generate hard-boiled atmosphere. Other highlights include Andrew Vachss' nasty exercise in self-preservation, and Ed Gorman's modern morality play in which the villains are weakness and lust, not thugs with guns. A wonderfully evil collection. Wes Lukowsky

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 019510353X
• ISBN 13: 9780195103533
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 544
• Editor: Pronzini Bill, Adrian Jack