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Hard-Boiled
Hard-Boiled
Murder taken out of the drawing room and into the streets. Realism. Chandler wrote about authors who "gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reason, not just to provide a corpse." Generally, but not always, featuring a private detective; usually, but not always, pervaded by pessimism. The humor, if any, will be dark. Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder novels are excellent examples. This style has been made into movies for decades (The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, Out of the Past) and can also be characterized by the same term, noir. Like crime novels, hardboiled stories tend to be urban.
Here are some examples:
