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"If there were no mystery left to explore life would get rather dull, wouldn't it?"
Sidney Buchman

         Greetings, last month I featured an interview with Charles Ardai, Edgar Award winning author and founder and publisher of Hard Case Crime, which publishes found classic hardboiled and noir mysteries as well as newly minted noir mysteries. But what keeps this type of mystery alive and vital to young-in-years and young-at-heart readers and has done so for over a century? The cover art is creative, yes, and enticing - inviting the reader to an ‘otherworld' where he or she can walk in the shoes of either a gumshoe or perhaps a flawed protagonist to solve the mystery alluded to by the cover page.

         Hardboiled crime fiction was first pioneered by Carroll John Daly in the 1920s, popularized by Dashiell Hammett and the unsentimental portrayal of crime, violence and sex (the ‘otherworld' of prohibition and bootlegging), then refined by Raymond Chandler about a decade later. Pulp magazines, most notably Black Mask, carried the stories to readers seeking an ‘otherworld' where the heroes were just tough enough to stay a step ahead of the villains (most of the time) and solved the puzzle by wit and physical engagement. The name, ‘hardboiled,' became associated with a private eye, working perhaps alongside the law, but not a part of the ‘system,' who was outwardly tough, yet maintained his/her own code of ethics or honor with ‘attitude,' or ‘cool.' Today, this tradition is carried on by writers such as Ross Macdonald, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, among others.

         Noir fiction, a subset of the hardboiled style, appeared on the scene when writers took this ‘cool' or ‘hardboiled' attitude and gave it to a ‘flawed' protagonist, someone connected with the crime as victim, suspect or even perpetrator, who was the one called upon to solve the crime or fix the situation, sometimes while self-destructing. James M. Cain, Dorothy Hughes and Elmore Leonard are some of the better known pioneer noir writers, each with their own way of embracing the ‘hardboiled' noir attitude. "Noir" (French for black) fiction derives from the blending of ‘dark' crime dramas and melodramas in classic Hollywood film (an example, Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon, the classic Humphrey Bogart film earlier published in serial form by Black Mask magazine).

         Neo-Noir is not ‘new' (neo), but a variant or blending of the above-two types of ‘hardboiled' stories that's been around since the 1930's. Here, the private detective may be melodramatic, or comedic (John Latimer's detective Bill Crane blended screwball comedy into solving the mystery - kind of like TV's ‘Columbo'). which recall my mention of two of the better known noir writers. Patricia Highsmith today is an internationally renowned writer of noir fiction, and I'd say she writes ‘neo-noir,' since her style has the characterization and tight plotting, but is less overt, it is deep and subtle.

         So, what has kept the ‘hardboiled' ‘noir' mystery a vital and dynamic read for near a century? Fast on the heels of Hard Case Crime, Black Mask has returned with online and hardcover publication of ‘found' short stories by Dashiell Hammett. What keeps readers coming back?

         Hardboiled and noir and neo-noir mysteries are all tightly written. The stories immediately take us to the otherworld the writer has woven of the urban realism of the time, be it the 1920s, 1960s, or 2000s or anywhere in between. The lean writing style makes each scene, sometimes each word, vital to the story, immersing the reader into the reality of the story. The protagonists, be they detectives hired to solve a crime or participants in the crime or mystery, are not perfect, but they follow their own code of ethics or mores. They have flaws sometimes comedic, sometimes self-destructive, sometimes dark, mostly clearly visible but occasionally subtle. But they each use their wits, albeit by their own moral code, to solve the crime or mystery, with the reader following word by word to the satisfying, believable solution.

         I hope you've enjoyed this journey and will revisit some classic and neo-classic mysteries, perhaps pen one of your own. In the tradition of the classic pulp magazines, here's a link to the writers' guidelines for a couple of print publications that welcome and encourage emerging writers:


                   http://www.themysteryplace.com/ahmm/guidelines/