. . gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons () He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk in the language they customarily used for these purposes (Angel 66). .
Hammett did not place his characters' crime stories within a rural setting, as was typical of earlier crime fiction, but in a sinister and forbidding urban environment. Perhaps most importantly, he introduced the figure of the tough-talking, brave, but also disillusioned and alienated private eye. This depiction of the investigator is a stark contrast to the intellectual type of detective exemplified by Sherlock Holmes. The story is realistic regarding the description of violence and language employed, but it also has an obvious allegorical subtext. The name of the city, Personville, frequently mispronounced as "Poisonville" suggests its function as a fictional microcosm of the whole society. A society that is poisoned by the corruption and violence of its citizens as the mispronunciation suggests. These two levels of the story are linked by the two hallucinations the Op encounters which gives the reader an in-depth view into the psychological reality of the Op's state of mind. It also expresses the detective's obsessive nature with his work, as well as his subconscious realization that an unqualified victory is not acceptable in his struggle to rid this town of its evils.
On a thematic level, hard-boiled fiction focuses on the secrets, mental depravity and human weakness leading to crime. This is in stark contrast to the swift restoration of law and order of the classic detective literary form. Hard-boiled fiction targeted the lower, working class to be accessible to the common reader, yet it also incorporated modernist themes and techniques. While some critics have denigrated hard-boiled fiction as nothing more than a lengthy puzzle, others have written about the genre as a tool for social commentary and a vehicle for discussing evolving notions regarding justice, morality and civic virtues.
