Meanings of hard-boiled detective in English

Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were the founding fathers of the American school of hard-boiled detective fiction.

The basic idea of every hard-boiled detective story is that the private eye searches for the clues with which to solve a mystery.

At these and other locations, Roth read classic yarns, swashbuckling high-seas adventures, hard-boiled detective stories, Western shoot-'em-ups, stories of prospectors digging for gold.

But as anyone who has read a hard-boiled detective novel knows, police tend to be less than fond of this sort of private-sector competition.

The Surrogates reminded me a little of "The Matrix," a little of Philip K. Dick, with a touch of hard-boiled detective thrown in.