What’s the derivation of the phrase “hard-boiled” to describe a person or fictional character? When was it first used?
In my earlier review of two favorite 1940s science fiction stories1, I avoided using the phrase “hard-boiled” to describe the heroes, even though they have many of the characteristics of hard-boiled heroes: Tough-minded, street-smart, fast-talking, and working the streets of early-20th-Century New York.
I didn’t say “hard-boiled” out of a vague conception that the phrase connoted a propensity toward brutal violence, which was not characteristic of those characters.
After posting, I wondered where the phrase “hard-boiled” came from and came upon this excellent Quora post from Paul Vargas, who states his credentials this way: “I researched 20th Century journalism as part of my doctoral studies.”
Vargas explains that the “hard-boiled school”
… was coined in the early 1930s to describe a group of writers of whom Dashiell Hammett was regarded as luminary (see The New York Times Aug 11 1935.) This ‘hard-boiled school’ depicted emotionally hardened characters in an uncaring world driven by money, power and sexual desire. The Encyclopaedia Britannica cites Hammett as the inventor of the genre and calls ‘Fly Paper’ (1929) the ‘first truly hard-boiled story.’ Other critics have disputed this. Ian Ousby regards Carroll John Daly (1889-1958) as the author in whose writing the hard-boiled elements first combine. The question is still open as ‘hard-boiled characters’ and crime-ridden urban landscapes prefigure ‘the hard-boiled school’ by some 30 or 40 years.
The phrase as a descriptor of human character goes back to thelast quarter of the 19th Century, Vargas says
Journalistic usage of ‘hard-boiled’ in the early 1900s connoted brutality and usually designated hoodlums. The phrase grew in usage after WW1 with the high-profile prosecution of ‘Hard-Boiled Smith,’ a US drill instructor accused of treating recruits with brutality. The case opened a widespread journalistic discourse on the use of brutality by the US army and police and the term ‘hard-boiled’ was one of its keynotes. ‘Hard-boiled’ really took off and almost everything was being evaluated for its potential. There were hard-boiled criminals, and hard-boiled towns, and there was hard-boiled talk and even hard-boiled items of clothing. Movie man Pat Dowling was remarked upon as wearing a hard-boiled hat (Moving Picture World vol 43 Mar 13 1920 p1779.)
In the 1920s, we start to see the phrase used to describe “tough and unsentimental characters without brutality.”
Read the whole post, which goes into more detail and includes scans of historical newspaper and magazine pages. Interesting and fun to read!