The American hard-boiled detective novel does not develop, as one might think, out of the classic detective story in the mold of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, but has its roots in the medieval romance and in the American Western novel. Whereas the classic detective story depicts an overwhelmingly positive, rural-pastoral society, the hard-boiled detective novel follows in the footsteps of the Grail-quest romances, in which the hero wanders through a barren countryside with an incapacitated king and finally manages to redeem this wasteland after great personal suffering.

Another model is the Western novel, in which the protagonist engages himself on the side of civilization against destructive, lawless forces, despite the fact that he himself views the advance of civilization with some hostility, as he has chosen to escape that civilization and to live in the untamed environment of the frontier on which this civilization...