Back in 1920, Henry Louis Mencken and George Jean Nathan ran a magazine for the well-heeled women and their sugar daddies up on Long Island: the Smart Set, they called it.

The Smart Set wasn’t doing so well – but Mencken had an idea. He had noticed that a periodical called Detective Story Magazine, was flying off newsstands, so he started his own crime pulp: Black Mask, the first issue of which landed in October 1920, complete with a woman being menaced with a burning branding iron on the cover.

Mencken had no illusions about Black Mask, writing to a friend that it was “a lousy magazine” but “it has kept us alive during a very bad year”. After just eight issues, Mencken and Nathan sold it on to a Madison Avenue publishing company – but there it pioneered a brand new genre: the hardboiled detective story.

Hardboiled is all about cynical, complex detectives; think of Humphrey Bogart’s turns as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Dashiell Hammett’s private eye, Sam Spade. What’s now considered the first hardboiled story was published by Black Mask in 1922: The False Burton Combs, written by Carroll John Daly (“I ain’t a crook; just a gentleman adventurer and make my living working against the law breakers. Not that work I with the police – no, not me. I’m no knight errant either.” The archetype was born: men out for justice and/or revenge, pounding perpetually rainy streets in a dark American city. But isn’t he an anachronism today?

“I suspect he always was,” says author Lawrence Block, who has been writing noir for 60 years. “Which is not to say that there aren’t a fair number of such lads walking around at present. I suppose the character owes much of his appeal to being the sort of person the reader would be if he could.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Black Mask Magazine from September 1929, featuring Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Photograph: Black Mask Magazine

Amid an explosion of pulp crime magazines – Dime Detective, Detective Tales, Strange Detective, Ace G-Man Stories – in the 20s and 30s, Black Mask would publish some of the greats: Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, early stories by Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner. As postwar paperbacks took off in the 50s, the market began to decline, but some periodicals endured – including Manhunt, on which a teenage Block got his big break in 1957, with You Can’t Lose. Now 78, Block is the writer behind creations including alcoholic ex-cop turned private eye Matthew Scudder and gentleman burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr.

Isn’t it tough to make readers embrace heroes with ambiguous morality? “Is it?” says Block. “I wonder. I guess I assume that if I can sympathise with a character, so can a reader. And if I can’t connect with the essential humanity of any of my characters, then I’m doing something wrong.”

Block’s early books are still published today – by Hard Case Crime, an imprint set up by Charles Ardai and Max Phillips to both bring lost noir classics back into print and to find new voices working the beat today. “We both grew up loving old paperback crime novels, but we were born too late to write books like those ourselves,” Ardai says. “Fifty years later, when we started writing novels, there were no more publishers left.”

Is the form still relevant? Ardai thinks so. “Some of it is nostalgia, sure – the appeal of the period trappings: the men in trenchcoats and fedoras, the femme fatale in her negligee, gun in hand. But nostalgia only gets you so far. It might make you pick up one book once, but it won’t make you buy another every month.”

“I think crime fiction is one of the most resilient and flexible means to tell a story,” says Alex Segura, author of a series of hardboiled detective stories starring PI Pete Fernandez. “It allows you to touch on social issues, on the inner quests and struggles we all face, and spin a compelling yarn at the same time. Especially now, with all the uncertainty we’re facing politically, the hardboiled PI – whose primary function is to ask the tough questions and press forward against stronger forces that don’t want their secrets uncovered – and the crime genre are all the more essential,” Segura says. “The PI will always be struggling to find answers to questions that people want to bury. That’s always interesting, and sadly, very relevant now.”



The best noir stories, Ardai says, could have been written today, even if they’re 50, 60, 70 years old. “Corruption and violence are hardly things of the past. Men in power taking advantage of the weak and getting away with murder – that’s the stuff of headlines today,” he says. “People turning to crime in desperation or out of frustration and anger. Frightened men on the run, or vengeful ones on the hunt – when did that ever go out of date?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Corruption and violence are hardly things of the past’ … Grifter’s Game by Laurence Block, published by Hard Case Crime

The only thing to go out of date is the idea that dames can’t write. Christa Faust sold her first story when she moved to Los Angeles in the early 90s and writes for Hard Case Crime. Her books have titles such as Choke Hold and Money Shot.

Faust likes the form, despite how women are treated in them – slapped at the nearest sign of emotion and usually the murder victim. “They’re like a form of time travel,” she says. “But I also like living in an era when I can be taken seriously, don’t need to have children to be considered a ‘real’ woman and can legally marry anyone I love.”

What bothers her is when modern writers use the excuse “that’s just how things were then” to write what she calls “fan fiction that indulges all their own sexist fantasies and juvenile wish fulfilment”. The ol’ broad-slapping archetype is less crucial to the genre than, say, the complexities of a gumshoe’s moral code. “Way too many modern writers and film-makers get hung up on the fedora and forget that real noir is about what’s going on underneath the hats,” says Faust. “Those original novels and movies already exist. Why copy them exactly if you aren’t bringing anything fresh to the table?”

The essence of the hardboiled character is as vital today as it was then, says Faust. “If you mean a complex, conflicted loner with a generally cynical worldview who gets mixed up in criminal endeavours but maintains a strong, though often unconventional, moral code. A wise-cracking, ruggedly handsome middle-aged white guy in a fedora and trenchcoat who slaps women and then kisses them? Maybe not so much.”

Charles Ardai needs a lot of convincing if he’s going to take on your hardboiled novel for Hard Case Crime. “You have to bring something new either way, or else the reader will be bored. It’s no fun at all to read cliches or stories that feel like you’ve read them a hundred times before,” he says. “Yes, we all love Chandler, but we already have one of him. We already have Elmore Leonard. We don’t need more imitations of those great men. But a new voice, one that makes the pages race by and your heart race as you turn them? That we always need. And happily, that’s what we keep discovering, year after year.”