Over the past decade or so, the hard-boiled detective novel, once American to the core, has acquired a variety of accents and identities. There are Scottish, Nordic and Japanese versions, for example, and a Russian series involving a penguin. So widespread is the allure of the slouch hat and cigarette, the blonde and the bottle, that even “mainstream” writers like John Banville and Thomas Pynchon have tried them on for size. Not that this is anything new. “There has been so much of this sort of thing,” Raymond Chandler complained in “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944), “that if a character in a detective story says, ‘Yeah,’...

Source: Wall Street Journal November 23, 2017 19:07 UTC