close your eyes -
you’ll be here soon. ichi, ni, san, shi, go, bun. tokidoki hontou ni nettai. demo kono waado dekinai.
o. ya. su. mi. o. ya. su. mi. o. ya. su. mi. o. ya. su--
The term comes from a process of hardening one's egg; to be hardboiled is to be comparatively tough. The hardboiled detective—originated by Carroll John Daly's Terry Mack and Race Williams and epitomized by Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe—not only solves mysteries, like his "softer" counterparts, the protagonist confronts violence on a regular basis leading to the burnout and the cynical (so-called "tough") attitude towards one's own emotions.
The style was pioneered by Carroll John Daly in the mid-1920s,
From its earliest days, hardboiled fiction was published in and closely associated with so-called pulp magazines, most famously Black Mask under the editorship of Joseph T. Shaw. In its earliest uses in the late 1920s, "hardboiled" didn't refer to a type of crime fiction; it meant the tough (cynical) attitude towards emotions triggered by violence.
Pulp historian Robert Sampson argues that Gordon Young's "Don Everhard" stories (which appeared in Adventure magazine from 1917 onwards), about an "extremely tough, unsentimental, and lethal" gun-toting urban gambler, anticipated the hardboiled detective stories.
Black Mask moved exclusively to publishing detective stories in 1933, Later, many hardboiled novels were published by houses specializing in paperback originals, also colloquially known as "pulps".
Consequently, "pulp fiction" is often used as a synonym for hardboiled crime fiction or gangster fiction; In the United States, the original hardboiled style has been emulated by innumerable writers, including Sue Grafton, Chester Himes, Paul Levine, John D. MacDonald, Ross Macdonald, Jim Butcher, Walter Mosley, Sara Paretsky, Robert B. Parker, and Mickey Spillane.
