stolen from brittanica.com

You people suck. English teachers have enough work to do without dealing with this crap. "hard-boiled fiction" a tough, unsentimental style of American crime writing that brought a new tone of earthy realism or naturalism to the field of detective fiction. Hard-boiled fiction used graphic sex and violence, vivid but often sordid urban backgrounds, and fast-paced, slangy dialogue. Credit for the invention of the genre belongs to Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), a former Pinkerton detective and contributor …

…Pictures (1935) and Eye Witness (1950), and W.R. Burnett (1899–1982), who wrote Little Caesar (1929) and The Asphalt Jungle (1949). Hard-boiled fiction ultimately degenerated into the extreme sensationalism and undisguised sadism of what Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine called the “guts-gore-and-gals-school,” as found in the works of Mickey Spillane, writer of such phenomenal best-sellers as I, the Jury (1947). The works of the hard-boiled school have been extensively translated into films, often through successive versions tailored to different generations of moviegoers.