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But even hard-boiled can be overdone. Says Evan Hunter, who as Ed McBain has written more than three dozen books in the 87th Precinct series: "For me, 'hard-boiled' means not turning away from a dead body and going into the hall to vomit. It means going into a morgue and smelling a stench that makes you want to wash your hands for days." In short, unflinching realism, a misunderstood term. Says Elmore Leonard, the macabre ironist of crime and punishment: "If I were to ever write a private-eye story, and try to make it as realistic as the stories I do write, what would he do? Private detectives don't do that much. You gather information in divorce cases, or spend a lot of time finding bail bondsmen."
From the start, the genre has taken shape and tone from the demands of its audience. The American male likes to believe that he is reading it like it is, and the novel of the modern knight-errant is very much a male genre. It operates on the rigid belief that the world is rotten; to think otherwise is dangerous and unmanly. A corollary view is that the deck is stacked against the decent little guy or distressed damsel. The evidence often seems overwhelming. The shattering aftereffects of World War I, the rise of organized crime during Prohibition, the disillusionment of the Depression, all paralleled the development of the gallant equalizer. Today he is likely to deal with government corruption, financial fraud and environmental threats. "I don't consider my newest book, Barrier Island, as hard-boiled fiction," says John D. MacDonald. "It's about a land scam in islands off the Mississippi coast." The detective story is one of the few fiction forms that deal directly with the seamier side of American life. To improvise on Mencken, himself an American institution no less secure than the one he launched with Black Mask, no one ever went broke overestimating the appetite for that.