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Okay, this should be fun, the idea is to list authors/titles/series that fall into the realm of hardboiled or noir. This is purely subjective, but let's try to be exclusive and elitist rather than have a list that includes Matlock and Monk (both of whom I enjoy, but they're a damn long ways from being hardboiled). I'll start with the stuff I know best, the pulps and the post-pulp paperback boom of the 1950s. If it's a series character from the 1960s - 1990s, I'm probably hip to the series. Post 2010 I'm completely lost, I'm sure that there's some good new material being written, I just haven't a clue as to where to look other than Hardcase Crime. So anyway, let's begin: Hailing from the pulps, obviously Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler always start lists like this, but in the Department of Didja Know, we have the early work of Erle Stanley Gardner, John D. MacDonald, Day Keene, James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich, James Hadley Chase, and Bruno Fischer. With the exception of Woolrich, who remained true to his roots throughout his career, all of these writers tended to mellow out as their popularity increased. The chroniclers of the exploits of Perry Mason and Travis McGee were far different writers in their early years. James M. Cain was always an anomaly, published and marketed as mainstream it's hard to imagine books such as Sinful Woman, Jealous Woman, and The Postman Always Rings Twice being pushed as mainstream offerings, just as it's hard to imagine James M. Cain not featuring more prominently in discussions of the "Great American Novelist". As for guys like Bruno Fischer and Day Keene, they made their bones writing for publications such as Dime Mystery Magazine, Dime Detective and in Fischer's case under pseudonyms like Harrison Storm and Russell Gray in Terror Tales and Horror Stories where he popularized the weird menace genre which was essentially hard-boiled dialed up to eleven. As the pulps died off after WWII, and were replaced by the digest magazines and paperback originals, we had a whole new generation of writers rise to prominence, I'll be back with a list covering the fabulous fifties after UFC Fight Night. ;-)