The genre of crime fiction in American literature and film covers a wide variety of styles and subgenres, but certain elements can be identified as being especially identified with American crime fiction. The private detective or private eye is the character most associated with American crime fiction, and as the private detective developed, he was part of a larger form known as the hardboiled school which referred to an attitude of toughness and cynicism that might be expressed by a policeman or lawyer as well as a private detective, though the private detective is the primary embodiment of the hardboiled school. Many of these novels and films use the private detective himself as the filter through which the rest of the story is told, either because he (and they were overwhelmingly male until recently) tells the story in the first-person or as narrator or because he is the central element in every scene and the viewer or reader learns only what he does. An examination of several of these works shows how certain traits are perpetuated in different private eye characters and how that character is to be found again and again in similar situations and a similar setting.
The Hollywood motion picture tends to be developed in generic categories that are easy to identify, easy to market, and repetitive in the way they are structured and in the mythos they present through their characters. The detective story is one of the staples of the Hollywood film, though in different periods the detective story has taken different forms according to public tastes. For that matter, the crime film has often been about a decade behind the development of crime fiction. The private detective was given one of its most important and influential incarnations in the novel The Maltese Falcon in 1929, and while the book was filmed first in 1930, it would be the 1941 version that made the private eye a film staple. The Philip Mallow novel by Raymond Chand...