A curate's hard-boiled egg
Tom Hiney
HARD-BOILED: AN ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN CRIME STORIES edited by Jack Adrian and Bill Pronzini OUP, £17.99, pp. 532 The trouble with short crime stories is that as soon as a character walks into the room you know he's about to get killed, or kill or find a corpse. There just isn't time for him to do much else. If a writer can still manage, despite that, to work suspense, originality and character development into 20 pages (and deliver a twist in the tail) then he really is a master of the game. This collection, whose 36 stories span seven decades of hard-boiled fiction, offers both masters and midgets, but generally midgets.
When crime fiction is bad, it is as lifeless as the corpses that the genre has always used to compensate for boring prose:
Actually I've never found fidelity a problem, except with my husband, of course.'
I headed for the Country Club section, and Brian Ingraham's home.
What Carmen had started to say was that if Brian, believing his wife a suicide, were to find out that Justinian had her killed, he could be expected to turn on Justinian. What Carmen had not said was that if Brian already knew it, and was co-operating with Justinian, his reaction would be quite different.
This was written in 1957 by Leigh Brack- ett, whom the editors of this anthology describe as 'one of the top hard-boiled- fiction writers of all time' (she adapted The Big Sleep for Howard Hawks). The danger here is a blind approval of anything hard- boiled. But just because a story contains tough language and realistic urban scenery it is not innately superior to the mannered crossword puzzles of vicarage assassination that preceded `hard-boiled' on both sides of the Atlantic; the sort of crime-writing (obviously not included in this collection) that was still appearing in The Black Mask in 1922: `My dear Inspector,' protested the Professor. `You surely cannot expect me to believe that a mere monkey ....'
`That monkey threw Madame La Torette into uncontrollable hysterics,' Inspector Donaldson insisted. 'Fifteen years ago, while on a hunting trip in Africa, her husband was crushed to death in the arms of a gorilla...
You can substitute the gorilla for a mobster and feel contemporary, but you still have to enthral the reader and turn out good dialogue.
it is the quality of the dialogue that marks out a great hard-boiled story, be it from Dashiell Hammett, Chandler or Tarantino. By that measure there are some fine stories here by forgotten writers like Raoul Whitfield and W. R. Burnett, who these days depend on anthologies such as this for their semi-immortality. But many of the less notable writers included here were producing up to a million words a year (several moonlighted under pseudonyms for Sci-fi and Western maga- zines) and one cannot expect single examples of their work to stand too much scrutiny, 40 or 50 years after they were hur- riedly published. There is a difference between a forgotten classic and dust- collecting mediocrity. Hard-boiled may be a relatively new genre, but there is clearly already a danger of treating its early speci- mens with kid gloves.
The editors of this book provide excel- lent potted profiles of each featured writer, some of which are as interesting as the included story. Andrew Vachss, for instance, was
a case worker for New York City's Depart- ment of Social Services, a special investigator for Save the Children in Biafra during its bloody civil war, and director of a maximum- security institution for juveniles.
Which is about as impressive a hard-boiled CV as you could imagine.
His story is called 'It's A Hard World'.
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