Quotes About Hard-boiled

Hammett was the ace performer... He is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of [The Glass Key] is the record of a man's devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.

A hard-boiled redhead sang a hard-boiled song in a voice that could have been used to split firewood (Guns at Cyrano's)

And there are still a number of people around who say that Hammett didn't write detective stories at all-merely hard-boiled chronicles of mean streets with a perfunctory mystery element dropped in like the olive in a martini. (The Simple Art of Murder)

You think you're hard-boiled but you're just a big slob that argues himself into a jam for the first tramp he finds in trouble.

I'm as fixed in my opinion as the man who thought he was a hard-boiled egg.

The Next Right Thing has humanity, humor, and insight to burn. Author Dan Barden takes the clay of the California hard-boiled novel and shapes it into something new.

Pick one. A theocracy ruled by witchburners. Or a fascist socialism designed by schoolboys. Or a crowd of hard-boiled pragmatists who favor shooting the horse that misses the hurdle. Step right up! Only one to a customer.

I am penniless and on the run. How fucking noir.

Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.

Who in the hell was Halliday? Just a guy from out of town who'd written a few bad mystery novels. Really a has-been. Still trying to ride along on the hard-boiled stuff that had gone out of favor with the old Black Mask.

A number of people have read 'Two-Way Split' and made certain assumptions about what the author's like, and I'm highly disappointing to them. I don't drink, I don't eat meat; that's very disappointing for a hard-boiled writer.

In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled; even the effortlessly superior. But irony originates in the glance and the shrug of the loser, the outsider, the despised minority. It is a nuance that comes most effortlessly to the oppressed.

It's possible to be hard-boiled and not noir, just as it's possible to be noir and not hard-boiled. And it is possible to be both. People debate endlessly what is hard-boiled and what is noir.

I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn't actually know I was Irish.

So that's the way you scientific detectives work. My god! for a fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy, you've got the vaguest way of doing things I ever heard of.

Cry Wolf' is a hard-boiled thriller written at break-neck pace of political corruption and organised, very violent crime.