Hard-Boiled

Detective fiction, in its many and varied forms, has fascinated audiences in the United States, Europe, and indeed throughout the world for well over a century. Legendary fictional sleuths like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Miss Jane Marple, Philip Marlowe and Inspector Maigret, to name only a few "classics," are of course staples of our literary culture as well as the inspiration of a seemingly endless stream of movie and television heroes that thrill and seduce one generation of viewers after another. So, too, are only slightly lesser "luminaries" (in this country) like Ross McDonald's Lew Archer and more recently, Robert Parker's Spenser and James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux, as well as a plethora of women detectives including Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski and Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone, among many others. Indeed, the latter were the subject of an earlier issue of South Central Review entitled Feminist Detective Fiction, ably co-guest- edited by Pamela Mathews and Mary Ann O'Farrell.

The current issue of South Central Review was originally intended as a kind of "prequel" or more accurately a "companion volume" to our issue on "Feminist Detective Fiction." It was intended to focus specifically, and, and we now realize, too narrowly on classic "hard-boiled" fiction, along with its recent and contemporary avatars. But once we began to assemble the articles and interviews included in this issue, we saw how limited and indeed constraining our traditional notion of "hard-boiled" was. To begin with, the tough, world weary, sharp-tongued, white heterosexual male detective who served as the archetypal hero of the great novels of Chandler, Hammett, James M. Cain, and others has undergone as many transformations as the genre itself, as both have been internationalized and "globalized" as well as modernized. Hard-boiled heroes now come from an extraordinary range of backgrounds, nationalities, and cultures, and their gender identities and family situations are diverse to an extent that would be unimaginable to the creators and early practitioners of the genre. Moreover, the mean streets of American cities or the seamy underworld of European capitals are no longer the only stomping grounds of hard-boiled heroes. The upper reaches of the corporate world and the corridors of political power are now also the frequent haunts of these detectives. Moreover, the dark and troubled pasts of perpetrators and victims alike that must be explored in order to solve the crimes of the present in the Lew Archer novels, for example, now expand to include national pasts and political crimes on a much larger scale. Especially where the French hard-boiled novel is concerned, Anissa Belhadjin, Claire Gorara, Don Reid, and Ralph Schoolcraft demonstrate that often crimes in the present are unsolvable without taking into account French complicity with the Nazis or the crimes and brutality linked to decolonization. This perspective is also echoed in the comments of Didier Daeninckx and other contemporary French hard-boiled writers Belhadjin has recorded for us here. Government corruption in contemporary Spain plays a major role in the novels of Alicia Giménez Bartlett, as Geoffrey Oxford explains in his essay. And political corruption is no less a "player" in the newly- emergent and rapidly evolving Moroccan hard-boiled novel, as Jonathan Smolin's article makes clear. The "simple art of murder," to invoke Raymond Chandler's famous title, becomes more complex and more complicated every day.

But this issue could hardly be called "Hard-Boiled" without discussions of the great classic American writers and their works and the works of their able successors. So we are very pleased to publish essays by Kristen Garrisson on Chandler's Marlowe, James Golsan on Parker's Spenser, Michael Kreyling on MacDonald's Lew Archer, and Beverly Six on Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski. We are also delighted to publish interviews accorded to us by the novelists James Lee Burke and Robert B. Parker, and the critic John Irwin.

As this issue on "Hard-boiled" was nearing completion, we were very, very saddened to learn of the sudden passing of Robert B. Parker. For both of us, Spenser, Susan and Hawk...