‘… a hard-boiled gentleman’—Raymond Chandler’s Hero

Abstract

The calm spell of the clue-puzzle entranced many readers in the twenties and thirties on both sides of the Atlantic. In the USA Erie Stanley Gardner reproduced Christie’s arid certainty, while ‘S. S. Van Dine’ and Rex Stout matched Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham in creating an intellectualised, languidly triumphant detective hero. But even in Britain clue-puzzlers did not dominate the market, great though their prestige became. Simpler reflexes of Sherlock Holmes like Sexton Blake or the Saint had wide appeal to an audience younger, less cerebral or more naive than the clue- puzzle addicts, and Bulldog Drummond’s violent defence of British respectability gave widespread satisfaction. In America the clue- puzzlers’ authority was never so strong, partly because their natural socio-intellectual base was not so powerful in the opinion-making media, but also because a readily identifiable alternative genre arose, the tough-guy or hard-boiled thriller.