Post #508216 by Atomic Tiki Punk on Sun, Jan 31, 2010 8:33 PM

Here is my 2 cents,

The Hard-Boiled genre's roots are literary, also known as Detective fiction around the 1920s then on to the 40s & 50s, this predates Noir,
What would become the Film Noir style cinematically speaking, was started in the cinema in the late 30's thru 1940's with Hard-Boiled crime stories.
but it would be the end of World War Two & the many returning soldiers, unsure of bright futures, now cynical & facing the realities
of life after wartime that permeated this attitude in Hollywood, bringing morally ambiguous, cynical, darker stories & mostly unconcerned with happy endings.

Hollywood's classic film Noir period is generally regarded as stretching from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. Film Noir of this era is associated with a low-key black-and-white visual style that has roots in German Expressionist cinematography, while many of the prototypical stories and much of the attitude of classic Noir derive from the Hardboiled school of crime fiction that emerged in the United States during the Depression.

See Ftitz Lang & F. W. Murnau and a bit later Billy Wilder for heavy German influence's on the Proto-Noir beginnings.

Edgar Allan Poe's tale "The Cask of Amontillado", published in 1846. Poe created the first fictional detective (a word unknown at the time) as the central character of some of his short stories (which he called "Tales of Ratiocination")
One of the early developments started by Poe was the so-called locked room mystery in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue".

Modern Hard-Boiled/Detetive fiction started with the magazine "Black Mask". The magazine was founded in 1920 by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan; in the early 1920s, Dashiell Hammett and Carroll John Daly began writing for Black Mask, and the identity of the magazine became more sharply defined when the editorship was taken over in 1926 by Captain Joseph T. Shaw. Shaw encouraged a high standard of colloquial, racy writing, favouring 'economy of expression' and 'authenticity in character and action’, all of which are important features of the hard-boiled style

Spearheaded by writers like Dashiell Hammett (1894 - 1961), Raymond Chandler (1888 - 1959), Jonathan Latimer (1906 - 1983), Mickey Spillane (1918 - 2006)

So Hard-Boiled fiction influenced film Noir.........

(Edited for spelling)

[ Edited by: Atomic Tiki Punk 2014-09-01 05:20 ]