American Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction

Few American authors, after Poe, contributed to detective fiction until the 1920s—the most prominent were Mary Roberts Rinehart, S. S. Van Dine, Ellery Queen, and John Dickson Carr. All the same, they did not create their own formula, but they mainly imitated and developed the conventions and the elegant style of the British writers. With the emergence of hard-boiled detective fiction in the late 1920s, however, American writers created an innovative and fundamentally different subgenre.