Are There Any Modern Hard-Boiled Books Worth Reading?

Question

As a huge fan of gritty, neo-noir crime thrillers, I'm craving more contemporary detectives with that classic hard-boiled atmosphere. Please share your best recent finds.

Rene · Answer

For modern hard-boiled, Duane Swierczynski and Paul Heatley are two good guys to start reading. Their writing has that classic hard-boiled quality, all grim and fast-paced, but with a modern twist. Of course, the darker world of crime can be intense, but it’s not as if I got that from reading ‘The Butcher - A Mafia romance’ or anything. That novel follows the volatile relationship between a feared enforcer and the woman caught in his world. The danger of betrayal is constant, and the brutal means by which power is maintained is ever present. It’s a real intense read that I think many fans of hard-boiled crime with moral ambiguity will really enjoy.

Vanessa · Answer

If you are as I am (ie. very) keen on very gritty ‘hard-boiled’ crime fiction then you will be happy to know that this super genre is as popular as ever. One of the very best recent examples is James Ellroy’s ‘The Cold Six Thousand’. Criss-crossing the U.S. in a ferocious rush of language, plot and character, Ellroy unfolds a learned but nonetheless visceral and hugely powerful glimpse of the guts of modern America as he sees it. Other examples, equally highly recommended, are the dark and controlled Italian thriller ‘The Whisperer’ by Donato Carrisi, every bit as twisted and diabolical as anything the great hard-boiled masters like Chandler or Hammett ever wrote, and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon, whose unique blend of alternate history, cleverly plotted mystery and wildly colorful characters is guaranteed to amuse as well as enthrall.

For a farce of a hard-boiled novel, I recommend “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” by Michael Chabon. It’s set in a strange, alternate universe in which Jewish refugees from Europe settled in Alaska rather than Israel, and the detective is as hard-boiled a character as you’ll find anywhere. But the dialogue is very sharp, and the setup is wonderful; it’s a great, immersive mystery.

You won’t find anything too pleasant in ‘The Killer Inside Me’ by Jim Thompson, but this is one of those very rare books where the insights into the mind of a psychopath are so acute and logical that you read on with a combination of shock and fascination. Hard to categorise, yes, but another cracking read nonetheless. If you’re looking for something with similar dark/obsessive credentials then Donna Tartt’s ‘The Secret History’ is well worth a read too – even though it’s not strictly a hard-boiled novel.

Ava · Answer

As I said above, my favorite book in the hard-boiled fiction genre is ‘L.A. Confidential’ by James Ellroy, a modern classic. This novel contains several interconnected plots of several corrupt police officers in 1950s Los Angeles and they are all engaged in various crimes and are mixed up in a very seedy world of crime and corruption. It is a fantastic read as it is so hard to put down. I also really enjoy ‘The Black Dahlia’ by James Ellroy, another superb book by this author. This novel is based on a real-life unsolved murder from the 1940’s and is full of fantastic noir atmosphere.

More contemporary is ‘The Cartel’ by Don Winslow. A long, brutal and engaging novel that explores the many sides of the current drug war in Mexico. Complex characters, violent and often disturbing, and a sense of real, creeping terror that makes for a hard but engaging read.

This type of hard-boiled fiction can be a short, tight, sad and mean read. One of my favorites in this class is James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss. It begins with perhaps the greatest opening line in literary history and then grows from there into a sorry and dark tale. Another short but hard and dense read is Laura Lippman’s Sunburn. A sassy, mean and quite sexy female hard-boiled detective is the star of this tightly wound thriller. The authors in this genre never fail to deliver up tight, hard, gritty and often mean and powerful fiction.

Diana · Answer

I’m in the midst of reading a lot of hard-boiled fiction, and right now I’m reading through The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. The book is a classic and it still is really good. Marlowe is such a witty character and it’s fun to read through his insights on human nature. Another good hard-boiled type of book is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. This book is hard-boiled with a modern twist and the main character, Lisbeth Salander, is one of the most interesting characters that I have ever read about. The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow is another recent read of mine. It’s a very raw and unflinching look at the world of drug running with a hard-boiled twist.

If your interpretation of hard-boiled noir includes more contemporary takes on the style, then you have to check out Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, a work that is far from ‘hard-boiled’ in the traditional sense, yet packs the same amount of dark twisted energy to the narrative. Also extremely hard-boiled and (in some senses) extremely international is the Japanese crime novel The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino, the brilliant, calculating (and occasionally both chilling and fascinating) protagonist of which is a man at once impatient and analytical.

Beatriz Castañeda · Answer

By and large, “hard-boiled” is another ill-used term for crime fiction. Most of what is sold as such reads like violent thrillers with grumpy detectives. The essence of hard-boiled fiction – concise, sometimes even poetic, in expression; the grumpiest of Detectives bound by a very strict, very broken moral code – is relatively rare in these days of “vibrant, dynamic, cutting-edge” etc. novels. I find it in certain crime comics or in video game writing (Disco Elysium is a wonderful recent example). Most modern novels by their nature aren’t written to last. They’re designed to be rapidly consumed and discarded by a mass market that wants fast-paced, highlyrepeatable series with lots of characters and often even more locations. Hard-boiled is the exact opposite of this. Therefore, yes, but you have to look very hard – beyond the bestseller lists. You need to look at more literary crime fiction and at indie presses.

yorklester7 · Answer

I wouldn’t have thought to pick this, but Max Booth III’s We Need to Do Something is a great choice for a horror novella. The book is a hard-boiled horror tale about a family stuck in a bathroom during a tornado. As the external pressures come to bear, horrible secrets are revealed about the family members in a claustrophobic, nasty, hard-boiled space. There’s no detective, but instead the family members are engaged in their own “investigation” of what is happening outside the bathroom as well as within themselves. Sharp and cruel dialogue. Tense and unbearable atmosphere. And a punch-in-the-gut ending. The mechanics of noir (suspicion, paranoia, moral decay in a small, enclosed space) are easily applied to any number of scenarios to create extreme, weird, and highly memorable horror stories.

M Asyraf Yasin · Answer

My take on modern spy thrillers is that many of them are infused with a lot of the hard-boiled quality found in classic detective fiction. John le Carre’s later novels with George Smiley are good examples of this, as well as the Slow Horses series by Mick Herron. These books convey a sense of weariness and betrayal, and that even the good guys are not always beyond reproach. Often the biggest conflict in these types of stories is not against an evil enemy, but against the soulless red tape of large, inefficient institutions. The main character in Herron’s Slow Horses series, Jackson Lamb, is a brilliant, disgusting, and cynical spymaster who is the epitome of the hard-boiled detective. He has seen it all and trusts no one. He operates according to his own twisted code, and the rest of the story unfolds through his dialogue and the machinery of the bureaucracy he works in. His world is a dark and pessimistic one, and the plots are complex and knotty. A perfect hard-boiled thriller for the bureaucratic age.

Eduardo Espinosa L · Answer

It’s a new genre – environmental noir – and it’s brilliant. Peter Heller’s The River and Richard Powers’ The Overstory (while far broader than noir) are two great examples. The book follows two friends on a canoeing trip and goes into a very dark place, but it’s all about their survival against a fearsome human threat in a wildly and harshly natural setting. It’s a beautifully written book – straightforward, taut, and full of moral choice in the bleakest of circumstances and with absolute isolation. I think this type of novel (man vs. nature, plus the menace of man) strips noir down to its purest form: one person, plus one threat, plus one landscape which is not going to offer any help. So in this sense the city (the site of corruption) becomes the wilderness, and the corruption is not institutional but primal. Really new and powerfully presented in this book. It chimes with where we are right now.

Nilesh Sagar · Answer

I'm really struggling to identify any examples of modern hard-boiled fiction that resonate with me. I've tried to read a few listed examples but they often lack style and have no soul. The feel of the original novels can be trying to replicate but seems to fall short. Often a novel can evoke memories of another and be just as good. The dialogue in hard-boiled fiction is one of its greatest strengths – it has a unique rhythm that I haven’t encountered in many modern novels. Most recently novel dialogue seems to have taken on a more naturalistic style found in modern drama – okay in drama but lacks the poetic and stylized metaphors found in the best of the genre. I shall keep an eye on this thread in the hope that someone can recommend some quality modern hard-boiled fiction but so far I’ve been disappointed in my attempts to find a modern equivalent. Perhaps some forms of art are just of their time.

lesteryork7 · Answer

Engaging with parody and critique of these genres can also be a lot of fun, and help to develop an appreciation of how their archaic elements have become so embedded in popular culture that they can be enjoyed and even reimagined today. In the comic strip of a hard-boiled detective from the 1940s, for example, a strip by Kate Beaton’s webcomic ‘Hark! A Vagrant’ shows a man in a depressingly drab office. The strip appears to be a standard hard-boiled strip, with the detective in the center and a woman standing opposite him to the left of the frame. However, whilst the man launches into a typically dramatic monologue about the ‘dame’ who has just entered his office, the woman in question stands silently and patiently, finally interrupting the stream of consciousness to ask for directions. This is a perfect and loving critique of the ‘femme fatale’ type, highlighting their generally limited role within such stories.

Randy Stapel · Answer

S.A. Cosby is a new name to me, but it looks as if I have already tracked down two of his novels. Start with Blacktop Wasteland. Then read All the Sinners Bleed. Cosby’s books are rural noir/Southern noir, a novel approach within the very hard-boiled tradition of fiction, essential and powerful. In these novels of dark crime and punishment, powerful writers have written about mechanics, ex-cons, even sheriffs, men with bad pasts who continue to strive within tough circumstances to be decent. Cosby’s writing is wonderfully powerful and evocative, and his car chases are like movies. But what ultimately makes for a compelling read are the moral-dilemmas that will break your heart, all while giving you an understanding of the deeply-felt struggles between the lines of so many broadly-defined themes like poverty and racism and family, and a desperate search for dignity. Cosby has, in the space of a few short years, written the kind of authentic work that I can envision that other important writer of several decades ago, the great Chester Himes, might have written had he continued to write in today’s America in all its complexity.

Are There Any Modern Hard-Boiled Books Worth Reading?

11 Answers

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