There are many sub-genres of detective fiction and hard-boiled fiction is one of them. What exactly is hard-boiled detective fiction? Hard-Boiled detective fiction is fiction that features tough, cynical, urban private eyes who expose corruption and frequently get injured in the course of their investigations ("Detective Fiction," Literary). Hard-Boiled fiction is considered one of the more popular sub-genres of detective fiction; there have been numerous films and novels about urban detectives exposing corruption in the police force and in politics. The author credited with inventing the first successful hard-boiled story is Carroll John Daly. His character, Terry Mack, was quick to fight, was quick to shoot and he made plenty of …show more content…

There were many new themes added to the genre during this time, some writers took all traces of mystery out of the novel and left only the action, others created more realistic characters with problems such as we have in the real world, but for the most part the detective was still a gun-slinging wise-crack who didn't mind a few scrapes and bruises. At this time dime novels were very popular. Dime novels are obviously novels that could be bought for only a dime. These novels were also a major contributing factor to the popularity of the genre, because the novel could be bought for so little more and more people were buying one. The other effect of the novels being sold for only a dime was that authors would write thousands of words every week just to sell their story, if they were lucky a publisher would buy the rights to the novel and it would become popular and bring them a considerable sum of money (Marling). Sadly after the 1950s hard-boiled fiction started to decline in popularity, people were moving on to other genres of course there were exceptions but there were not very many. Today there are still many great hard-boiled detective novels but there are not many films made about hard-boiled detectives. Hard-Boiled fiction has branched into many sub-genres, some of which are very popular today (Siegel). Hard-Boiled fiction has come a long way from its beginnings in a monthly magazine millions of novels read around the world. The only place