Major Works
The following list is a great start for those who want to read the classic hard-boiled stories that have defined what is meant by a hard boiled fiction. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M Cain. It caused a scandal with its explosive mix of violence and sex. The torrid story of Frank Chambers, the amoral drifter, Cora, the sullen and brooding wife, and Nick Papadakis, the amiable but inconvenient husband, has pbecome a classic of its kind, and established Cain as a major novelist with a spare and vital prose style and a bleak vision of America. Cain’s another work Double Identity. Here, Walter Huff is an insurance investigator like any other until the day he meets the beautiful and dangerous Phyllis Nirdlinger and falls under her spell. Together they plot to kill her husband and split the insurance.
Another writer Raymond Chandler’s work The Long Goodbye deals about a down-and-out drunk Terry Lennox dying…show more content… Cain (1892–1977), particularly in such early works as The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1936). Another successor was Raymond Chandler (1888–1959), whose novels, such as The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), and The Little Sister (1949), deal with corruption and racketeering in Southern California. Other important writers of the hard-boiled school are George Harmon Coxe (1901–84), author of such thrillers as Murder with Pictures (1935) and Eye Witness (1950), and W.R. Burnett (1899–1982), who wrote Little Caesar (1929) and The Asphalt Jungle (1949). Hard-boiled fiction ultimately degenerated into the extreme sensationalism and undisguised sadism of what Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine called the “guts-gore-and-gals-school,” The works of the hard-boiled school have been extensively translated into films, often through successive versions tailored to different generations of