JB,
Re your question below:
"Hi,gang! Who's the hardest,of the hard-boiled writers,the
most hard-boiled? Thanks! See ya,on the mean streets!"
Good question. I think a case could be made that Spillane's
Mike Hammer is that hardest-boiled private eye character,
but, particularly recently, Spillane, as a writer rather than
as the creator of an iconic character, seems a little
tame.
The problem with a phrase like "MOST hard-boiled" is that one
can be so hard-boiled as to beover-the-top.
Is Don Pendleton more hard-boiled than Michael Connelly
because there's more death and destruction in one Executioner
novel than in Connelly's entire corpus? Probably, at one
level. But Mack Bolan is so tough that, ultimately, he's
unbelievable. So, on another level, a character like Harry
Bosch, more rooted in the real world, seems more believably
hard-boiled than Bolan, and, consequently, Connelly a more
hard-boiled writer than Pendleton.
Using that "believability" yardstick, and sticking to more or
less contemporary writers, here are a few nominees. Gerald
Petievich, Kent Anderson, Bill James, Donald Hamilton, Adam
Hall, John Wainwright, Joe Gores, Loren Estleman, and Richard
Stark.
Interestingly, considering how inestricably connected the
adjective "hard-boiled" is with the subject
"private eye," it's interesting that only twoof the writers I
suggest are PI novelists, and one of those, Gores, is a
fairly atypical one at that. That wasn't planned when I typed
my sggestions off the top of my head.
Maybe it goes back to that "believability" factor. I love the
hard-boiled private eye figure, but he (and, increasingly
she) has always seems like a fantasy construct. There are no
real PI's like Philip Marlowe or Mike Hammer. There ARE cops
like Charlie Carr and Colin Harpur, spies like Matt Helm and
Quiller, and professional criminals like Parker, and those
characters, and their creators, seem believably hard-boiled
in a way that even a well-made private eye can't.
JIM DOHERTY
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