In the second decade of the 20th century, America gave the world a new type of writing called "Hard-boiled." It was used to tell tales of urban misadventure, stories as tough and violent as the Prohibition ande Depression years that produced them.
A hard-boiled streak can be traced through a large chunk of modern American letters; for most readers, though, hard-boiled means crime: those who commit it, suffer it, or try to avenge it.
The first great master of hard-boiled crime-fiction, Dashiell Hammett, had been a Pinkerton detective; and his prose had a hard-bitten authenticity. One of Hammet's most gifted successors, the one-time poet Raymond Chandler, struck a more romantic note in defining his view of the hard-boiled hero: "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid." Writers have been crafting hard-boiled stories from Hammett's and Chandler's early templates ever since.
KCRW's Mean Streets, USA presents unabridged performances of some of the best hard-boiled stories from the genre's beginnings to the present.
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Chandler came to detective fiction-writing late in life, after
a brief career as an executive in the Southern California oil business;
but he made up for lost time, writing seven novels and several short stories
(most involving a Los Angeles private detective named Philip Marlowe)
that are recognized around the world as one of the great achievements
of the mystery genre.
Born in Illinois in 1888, Chandler was raised in England and served with the Canadian Army in World War One. He was 45 when he sold his first crime-fiction story to Black Mask Magazine in 1933. He was 51 when he published his first novel, "The Big Sleep."
Raymond Chandler combined the hard-boiled realism of Dashiell Hammett
with his own half-hidden romanticism; and he wrote in a prose style rich
with comic metaphor and laced with melancholy.
Hollywood script assignments made Chandler financially comfortable, and the hit movies made from his books brought him fame. He died in 1959, four years after the death of his wife of 30 years. The couple had no children; but as an author, Chandler spawned dozens of literary offspring, who would perpetuate his special sort of private-eye story for decades to come.
Michael Connelly
Michael Connelly began his writing life as a newspaper reporter working
the crime beat, first in Florida and then in Los Angeles; and he brings
a good reporter's knowledge of human nature and an eye for the significant
detail to his best-selling, award-winning fiction.
His first novel, "The Black Echo," in 1992, introduced the continuing protagonist Harry Bosch, a Los Angeles police detective with a passion for justice and a personal history almost as vexed as those of the sociopaths and psychopaths he pursues.
"The Black Echo" was a hit. The several Bosch books which followed (including
"Trunk Music," "Angel's Flight," "City of Bones," and "The Narrows"),
as well as some half-dozen other novels, increased Connelly's readership
(which was said to include then-President Bill Clinton) and strengthened
his reputation as one of the most interesting and gifted of contemporary
crime-fiction writers.
In interviews, Michael Connelly has paid due homage to Raymond Chandler, whose work he says helped inspire his own. Like Chandler, Connelly has a strong sense of place and of local history. One of the pleasures of Michael Connelly's books is the way in which they venture into and make interesting comments upon various corners of post-Chandler Southern California.
Jim Fusilli
Music, from the blues to the Beatles to Bach, is woven throughout the
adventures of Terry Orr, the pro-bono private investigator at the center
of Jim Fusilli's award-winning series of crime novels set in and around
New York City. Those sounds are a passion of Orr's creator: Jim Fusilli,
born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1953, has for several years been music
critic for the Wall Street Journal and for National Public Radio's "All
Things Considered." In 2005, he wrote a book about the Beach Boys' album,
"Pet Sounds."
"Closing Time," Fusilli's first novel, introduced readers in 2001 to the
compelling character of Terry Orr. That book, and three that followed
in the series, drew extravagant praise from reviewers. The New York Times's
mystery critic said Manhattan resident Orr, a widower raising a teenaged
daughter while he hunts the man responsible for the death of his wife
and infant son, was doing "what he was born to do: walk this lonely landscape
at all hours, searching for signs of redemption in the black-and-white
street scenes that are Fusilli's tone poems to the bruised heart of his
city."
Jim Fusilli has said that his thrillers are really "love stories about families."
Sue Grafton
Sue Grafton was not the first woman author to tell stories about a female private eye, but she's certainly one of the most enduring. Her popular character Kinsey Millhone has been narrating Grafton's "alphabetical-mystery" series for a quarter-century.
Born in Kentucky in 1940, Sue Grafton was the daughter of C.W. Grafton,
a lawyer who published three mystery books. Daughter Sue, after writing
two mainstream novels and a number of Hollywood scripts, continued the
family mystery-tradition by introducing the tart-tongued Millhone in the
1982 book "A is for Alibi".
By then, Grafton was living in Santa Barbara, California, as was author
Ross Macdonald. In homage, Grafton placed her detective in the fictional
city of Santa Teresa: the same Santa Barbara-like town that Macdonald's
detective Lew Archer often had cause to visit.
Like Archer, Kinsey Millhone has many times found the causes of current
crimes in past events and family secrets. Like Raymond Chandler's Philip
Marlowe, she has a sharp eye for comic detail and pretentious behavior.
But Kinsey Millhone's voice is all her own, and has earned Grafton a large
and loyal readership.
As of now, Sue Grafton is past two-thirds of the way towards her alphabetical goal of the 26th and final Kinsey Millhone novel: "Z is for Zero."
Dashiell Hammett
The name Dashiell Hammett looms above all others in the history of hard-boiled
detective fiction.
Born in Maryland in 1894, Hammett served in the Army and worked as a Pinkerton
operative for four years before moving to San Francisco and selling his
first crime short-story in 1922. Pulp magazines like The Black Mask were
eager for Hammett's innovative writing: No one before had combined authentic
knowledge of investigative work with such literary flair.
In 1929, Hammett reached a wider, general audience with the publication
of his first novel, "Red Harvest." His next four books (and the movies
adapted from them), including "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Glass Key",
earned Dashiell Hammett an international reputation as a major American
author.
Hammett's last novel, "The Thin Man," was published in 1931; he died in
1961. But his books have remained almost continually in print, as new
generations discovered these tersely-written stories which always seemed
fresh. If anything, Hammett's critical stock has risen, in the 21st century.
As Ross Macdonald, one of his most gifted successors, said of Dashiell Hammett: "Sometimes it takes a hundred years for a really good, and new, kind of writer to get his meaning across."
Stuart M. Kaminsky
The well-regarded, award-winning, very prolific Stuart M. Kaminsky, born
in Chicago in 1934, published his first short story in 1966. He studied
as a journalist, worked as a public-information officer, served in the
US Army, and was for several years a university professor. He has particular
interests in film and popular culture - interests reflected in several
of the many novels, biographies, and screenplays he's written.
Possibly the best-known of his four series characters is Toby Peters, a poor but honest private eye who plies his trade among Hollywood movie stars of the 1930s and '40s.
Another of his recurring detective heroes is Moscow Police Inspector Porfiry
Rostnikov, whose 1988 adventure "A Cold Red Sunrise" won the Mystery Writers
of America's Edgar Award. Kaminsky also writes often about an aging Chicago
police detective named Abe Lieberman.
His most recent fictional creation is the Florida investigator Lew Fonesca,
a caring man who tries to cope with the loss of his wife by helping others
deal with life-and-death problems.
"My fiction has been somewhat intentionally eclectic," Stuart Kaminsky once wrote - but whatever mode he's writing in, this author says: "I want my novels to be entertaining."
No reader has ever complained about that.
(The Mystery Writers of American have named Stuart Kaminsky the 2006
Grand Master, their highest award. The presentation to be made at their
60th Annual Edgar Awards dinner Gala, April 27, 2006.)
Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard, born in New Orleans in 1925, is arguably the most admired
contemporary author of crime fiction in America.
This much-acclaimed chronicler of eccentric miscreants and human-sized
law-officers began his literary career writing Western stories and novels
in the 1950s, even as he did ad-agency work in Detroit. Shortly after
becoming a full-time writer, he published his first crime thriller, "The
Big Bounce," in 1969. Dozens of books have followed, including "Swag,"
"Stick," "Unknown Man No. 89," "City Primeval," "Glitz," and "Cuba Libre."
Many of Leonard's tales are set in Michigan, but two of his most popular
- "Get Shorty" and "Be Cool" - take place in Hollywood, a town that brings
out the author's sharp satirical side.
Most if not all of Elmore Leonard's books have been made into films, while
their prose has been praised by such international masters as Martin Amis.
"Leonard's skill at language, character, action, milieu, and the general
sociology of his novels," judges critic George Grella, "should guarantee
him a permanent place among the writers of his time."
With his sterling reviews and his ever-lengthening track record, Elmore Leonard could be the grand old man of hard-boiled letters - except he refuses to act either grand or old.
Dick Lochte
Born in New Orleans in 1944, Dick Lochte worked several years as a magazine
writer, film critic and theater reviewer in Los Angeles before publishing
his first mystery novel, "Sleeping Dog," in 1986. It was nominated for
an Edgar Award, and won the Nero Wolfe Award; and, in 2000, "Sleeping
Dog" - which featured the innovative teaming of a veteran gumshoe named
Leo Bloodworth with the smart if obstreperous 13-year-old Serendipity
Dahlquist - was named "one of the best 100 mysteries of the twentieth
century" by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association.
The book's successor, "Laughing Dog," followed in 1988. Since then, Lochte has written several more novels, including four in collaboration with attorney Christopher Darden.
Readers and reviewers have praised Lochte's deft combination of humor and serious detection. Critic Sharon A. Russell cited the author's ability to "combine interesting technical innovations in the genre with a careful exploration of some of its more traditional elements." Lochte, she said, writes "with a style that acknowledges the past. At the same time he develops his own voice, combining wit and insight in his depiction of the present."
Modern hard-boiled, with a wry sense of humor: a mixture even the hard-to-please Raymond Chandler could admire.
Ross Macdonald
Born in California in 1915 but raised in Canada, Ross Macdonald (the pen name of Kenneth Millar) [pronounced 'Miller'] was hailed during his lifetime as a culminating figure in the hard-boiled tradition of Dashiell [pronounced 'Da-SHEEL'] Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
After serving in World War II, Macdonald abandoned a promising academic career at the University of Michigan to write mystery fiction in Santa Barbara, California - inspired and aided by the success of his mystery-writing wife, Margaret Millar [pronounced 'Mil-LAR'].
In 1949, he published "The Moving Target," the first of several novels
to feature L.A. private investigator Lew Archer. Through Archer's eyes,
Ross Macdonald observed the changing California scene for nearly 30 years;
and as Chandler had transformed Hammett's hard-boiled vision through his
own more romanticized approach, so Macdonald reshaped Chandler's and Hammett's
type of story into his own tragic-poetic exploration of family guilts.
Ross Macdonald broke onto the bestseller lists in 1969 with his 15th Lew Archer book, "The Goodbye Look"; and he extended his streak with "The Underground Man" and "Sleeping Beauty." Critics from Matthew Bruccoli to Eudora Welty praised him as a unique American writer. Macdonald's artistic and commercial success inspired a new generation of mystery-fiction writers. He died in 1983.
Walter Mosley
Walter Mosley has become such a taken-for-granted presence on the crime-fiction
scene, it's hard to remember what a startling first-impression he made
in 1990 with his first Easy Rawlins novel, "Devil in a Blue Dress."
Born in 1952, Mosley was raised in Los Angeles; and it was that city -
in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s - which would be the site of his books about
the African-American investigator whose life, despite his name, was anything
but easy.
These tales turned Raymond Chandler's L.A. on its head, as they went down
mean streets (gentle ones, too) that even Chandler's Philip Marlowe rarely
had reason to explore. As an initially unlicensed investigator, Rawlins
makes his way in post-World War II California by trading favors, often
as a liaison between the black and white communities. It's tricky work,
and it exposes Easy to twice the number of risks he'd ordinarily face
in a treacherous milieu.
Once past the shock of their point-of-view - so similar yet so different from the traditional hard-boiled operative's - what strikes a reader most about the Rawlins books (and two other series launched by Mosley) is the often-poetic grace of their sentences, and the precisely-sketched humanity of each and every character.
George Pelecanos
An awareness of social issues and an interest in generational history
inform the work of George Pelecanos, a writer born in 1957 and raised
in Washington, D.C.
His first books, including "The Big Blowdown," explored the lives of various
Greek and Italian immigrant characters over several decades in the nation's
capital. In later novels, such as "Right as Rain" and "Hell to Pay," Pelecanos
dramatized relations between white and African-American citizens of D.C.
- all in the context of fast-paced thrillers reminiscent of the action-adventure
films of the 1960s and '70s which he so admires.
Pelecanos is knowledgeable about movies; he managed an independent film
production company with which the Coen Brothers were associated, and he's
done script-work in films and TV. But his literary output has stayed steady,
and his reputation with readers and critics seems to increase with each
book. Other Pelecanos titles much admired by his public include "King
Suckerman," "The Sweet Forever," and "Down by the River Where the Dead
Men Go." His novels have won many awards in America, Europe and Asia.
English critic Mike Ashley has predicted that George Pelecanos's books
"will become a chronicle of their period and a keystone of modern crime
fiction."
Andrew Vachss
Andrew Vachss has been a federal investigator in sexually transmitted
diseases, a social services caseworker, and a labor organizer, and has
directed a maximum-security prison for youthful offenders. Now a lawyer
in private practice, he represents children and youths exclusively.
He is the author of more than a dozen novels, including the Burke series,
two collections of short stories, and a wide variety of other material
including song lyrics, graphic novels, and a "children's book for adults."
His books have been translated into twenty languages and his work has
appeared in Parade, Antaeus, Esquire, Playboy, the New York Times and
numerous other forums.
A native New Yorker, he now divides his time between the city of his birth
and the Pacific Northwest.
To download free short stories by the author, or to hear other audio adaptations
of his work, visit www.vachss.com.