Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

that America was undergoing at that time. In hard-boiled writing, the city is corrupt,
disorientating and menacing, frequently depicted as a dark and confusing labyrinth. And
that can be seen through the characters who in one way or another echo the feeling of
disenchantment in the years between the wars which was exacerbated even further by
political and economic adversities. Criminality involving unlawful connections between
business and politics were increasingly evident in American cities, following the Volstead
Act of 1919 or the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression. This apprehensive
sense of fatality manifested in the hard-boiled fiction of this period is typically associated
with distrust that the lives of people can get any better under current economic and sociopolitical
circumstances and that they cannot but resort to a life of crime and marginality.
In 1926, the editorship of Black Mask was assumed by Captain Joseph T. Shaw,
who made it one of the most respected of the pulp magazines. In fact, the identity of the
magazine, which Shaw would never refer to as “pulp” but always as “the book” or the
“rough paper” magazine, became even more sharply defined. He would encourage other
writers to follow Hammett’s style in espousing a high pattern of colloquial, terse writing,
favouring, as he wrote, “economy of expression” and “authenticity in character and
action”, all of which are important features of the hard-boiled style. These features,
moreover, made hard-boiled writing a totally different category of crime fiction, as
Andrew Spicer notes, making it a more sophisticated, middle-class “English school” of
detective fiction, which included major names from the mystery fields such as Edgar Allan
Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers. Unlike the stories of
Sherlock Holmes, for instance, in which the whodunit (the most widespread subgenre of
the detective novel) is the most important element of detection, or the stories of Christie
which take place in confined settings (like trains or country houses), the hard-boiled school
intentionally challenged this type of mystery / detective story, proposing instead a
detective or a private eye, who works individually in an urban society which conceals
money and liaisons, power and sex, crime and corruption. Whereas most of the English
murder stories, “whose tough-sounding mysteries were intended as a challenge to the
genteel, formula-ridden puzzle stories of the British crime school” (Hirsch 1981:29),
depicted characters of a typically professional and upper class milieu, the urban American
crime stories would be totally different, focussing not on sober detectives but on gangsters
and other victims of crime.
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