From Hardboiled Novel to Film Noir: The Crime Writers Behind the Classics

Before there was a Sam Spade on screen, there was a Sam Spade in a pulp magazine. The Maltese Falcon ran as a serial in Black Mask in 1929 and 1930 before it became a novel, and Hollywood filmed it twice in the 1930s before John Huston got it right in 1941. That pattern repeats across the classic period. The link between hardboiled fiction and film noir is so close that you can trace a large share of the best-known noirs back to a small shelf of crime writers, most of whom started out writing for cheap magazines printed on rough wood-pulp paper.

What “hardboiled” meant

Hardboiled crime fiction emerged in American pulp magazines in the 1920s, and Black Mask, especially under editor Joseph T. Shaw from 1926, became its most famous home. In place of the drawing-room puzzles of the English detective story, these writers offered tough, plain-spoken investigators, violent cities, corrupt police and politicians, and prose stripped down to clipped dialogue and hard images. Raymond Chandler later defended the style in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944), writing that Hammett “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons.” The same essay contains his best-known description of the detective hero: “down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean.”

Those qualities translated naturally to the screen. The fiction already had a voice, often first-person, that suited voice-over narration. Its heroes were morally ambiguous, its plots were driven by desire and money, and its settings were night-time cities. When French critics in 1946 began calling these films “noir,” they were partly thinking of the Série noire, a French book series of translated hardboiled crime novels. My piece on what film noir is tells that story.

The big four

Dashiell Hammett

Hammett had worked as a Pinkerton detective before he wrote fiction, and his stories brought an insider’s matter-of-factness to crime. The Maltese Falcon (1930) was first filmed in 1931, again in 1936 as the loosely adapted Satan Met a Lady, and then in 1941 with Humphrey Bogart, a version that follows the novel’s dialogue closely. The Glass Key (1931), a story of political corruption, was filmed in 1935 and again in 1942 with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. Hammett’s The Thin Man became a much lighter film series, a reminder that his work could be played as comedy as well as noir.

Raymond Chandler

Chandler came to fiction late, publishing his first story in Black Mask in 1933, and his detective Philip Marlowe became the model for the screen private eye. Farewell, My Lovely (1940) was filmed as Murder, My Sweet (1944) with Dick Powell. The Big Sleep (1939) became Howard Hawks’s 1946 film with Bogart and Lauren Bacall, from a screenplay by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman. The Lady in the Lake became an MGM film directed by and starring Robert Montgomery, told almost entirely through the camera as Marlowe’s eyes.

Chandler also worked directly for the studios. He co-wrote the screenplay of Double Indemnity (1944) with Billy Wilder, wrote the original screenplay for The Blue Dahlia (1946), and shares the screenplay credit on Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951).

James M. Cain

Cain was not a detective writer at all. His novels are about ordinary people, usually a man and a woman, who commit a crime for love and money and are destroyed by it. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) was adapted in France as Le Dernier Tournant (1939) and in Italy, without authorization, as Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943), before MGM made its version in 1946 with Lana Turner and John Garfield. Double Indemnity first appeared as a magazine serial in Liberty in 1936. Mildred Pierce (1941) became the 1945 Warner Bros. film that won Joan Crawford her Academy Award, though the screenplay added a murder that is not in the novel.

Cornell Woolrich

Woolrich, who also wrote as William Irish and George Hopley, was the great poet of dread in this group. His stories are about ordinary people caught in a nightmare, often racing a clock. Phantom Lady, published under the Irish name in 1942, became Robert Siodmak’s 1944 film. His short story “It Had to Be Murder” became Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), and “The Boy Cried Murder” became The Window (1949). François Truffaut later adapted him in The Bride Wore Black (1968).

Other writers on the shelf

Two of these deserve a note. Dorothy B. Hughes’s novel In a Lonely Place is told from inside the mind of a killer; the film changes the story substantially, making its central character a screenwriter whose guilt is uncertain. Vera Caspary’s Laura is one of several important noir sources written by women, alongside Hughes and, in the domestic-suspense line, writers such as Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, whose The Blank Wall became Max Ophüls’s The Reckless Moment (1949).

Jim Thompson, whose bleak novels were mostly adapted after the classic period, is a bridge to later work: he is credited with dialogue on Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), and his books later became neo-noirs such as The Grifters (1990).

Two strands: the detective and the ordinary man

Looking across these writers, two different kinds of story fed into noir, and it helps to keep them apart.

The first is the private-eye story of Hammett and Chandler. Its hero is a professional who walks into other people’s trouble, usually for a fee. He may be cynical and bruised, but he has a code, and the plot tests it. Sam Spade turns in the woman he may love because his partner was killed and a detective cannot let that go. Marlowe keeps faith with clients who lie to him. These stories gave noir its investigators, its wisecracks and its tours of a city’s hidden layers, from mansions to back rooms.

The second strand belongs to Cain and Woolrich. Here there is no detective at the center, or if there is, he arrives too late. The protagonist is an ordinary man, a drifter, a salesman, a husband, who makes one bad decision and spends the rest of the story paying for it. These books gave noir its doomed couples, its confessional narrators and its sense of a trap closing.

Many of the best films mix the two. Double Indemnity is a Cain story with a dogged investigator in Edward G. Robinson’s claims manager, and The Killers wraps a doomed man’s story inside an insurance investigation. Knowing which strand a film comes from tells you what kind of ending to expect.

What changed between page and screen

Adaptation under the Production Code meant compromise. Novels that ended with criminals going free, or that dealt openly with sex, drugs or homosexuality, had to be altered. Double Indemnity was considered unfilmable for years after its serialization because of the Code; the 1944 film had to make sure the guilty were punished. In The Big Sleep, elements of the novel’s pornography racket were made vague, which is one reason the film’s plot can be hard to follow. In a Lonely Place moved so far from its source that it became a different story.

Some things the films added. The hardboiled first-person voice became voice-over narration, and the writers’ wisecracking dialogue gave stars like Bogart and Powell new screen personas. Studio cinematographers built a visual equivalent of the prose’s bleakness, covered in my piece on film noir lighting. And screenwriters, Chandler among them, learned to compress the novels’ digressions into tight, quotable scenes.

Reading your way into noir

If you enjoy the films, the books are well worth reading, and they are a different experience. Hammett is lean and almost cold; Chandler is lush, funny and melancholy, more interested in Los Angeles than in solving the crime; Cain is fast and claustrophobic; Woolrich is feverish. A good sequence is to read a novel and then watch its adaptation: The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Farewell, My Lovely with Murder, My Sweet, and In a Lonely Place, where the gap between book and film is a lesson in itself.