The best hard-boiled detective novels from Next Chapter [March 2023]
The hard-boiled mystery book genre emerged in the United States during the early 20th century, characterized by gritty realism and tough, cynical detectives who confront and solve violent crimes. This sub-genre of crime fiction is known for its fast-paced action, complex characters, and dark themes, and has been highly influential in shaping the modern detective story.
The term "hard-boiled" refers to the tough, unyielding attitude of the genre's protagonists, who often have a troubled past and use violence as a means to achieve justice. The style of writing is terse and minimalistic, with a focus on action and dialogue over description and introspection. In contrast to the more genteel and intellectual mystery novels of the time, hard-boiled mysteries reflect the gritty reality of urban life, exploring issues such as corruption, organized crime, and the underbelly of society.
Some of the most famous writers in the hard-boiled mystery book genre include Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain. Their works have been adapted into numerous films and TV shows, and continue to be popular among readers and viewers today. With its emphasis on realism, hard-boiled mysteries have had a lasting impact on crime fiction and popular culture, and continue to captivate audiences with their thrilling tales of tough detectives, dangerous criminals, and gritty urban landscapes.
Here you’ll find some of the best hard-boiled detective novels from our authors, as of 03/2023. Some of the books on this page are completely free to download as eBooks. If you enjoy one of the stories below, please don’t forget to leave the author a review! Don’t agree with our choices? Please leave a comment and let us know your favorite :)
Books featured on this page
Corpses Say The Darndest Things (Nod Blake Mysteries Book 1) by Doug Lamoreux
Murderous Passions (Turner Hahn And Frank Morales Crime Mysteries Book 1) by B.R. Stateham
Looking For Henry Turner (Mo Gold And Birdie Mysteries Book 1) by W.L. Liberman
Corpses Say The Darndest Things (Nod Blake Mysteries Book 1) by Doug Lamoreux
Book excerpt
“I appreciate your coming down,” I said and gestured to the empty chair on the other side of my desk. It was the following morning; the third day of the murder case. “Have a seat.”
Reggie Riaz looked thinner in the flesh than on television. I guess the claim the camera adds twenty pounds was true. Otherwise he looked like what he was; a handsome Mexican in his late-twenties, three inches shorter than me with black wavy hair, a thin black mustache, and dark copper skin. He wore a button down shirt, jeans, and an expression that said he'd rather have been anywhere else on earth. My invitation to sit didn't alter that. He stared at the chair as if it were the hot squat; which was silly, Illinois hadn't burned a guy since the early sixties. And, in this town, where you could get a lethal injection standing on the wrong street corner, why worry? Despite his hesitation, with no excuse to leave and no other way out, what could the poor guy do but sit? He finally did, uneasily.
“I was hoping you'd bring Mrs. Riaz. I'd like to speak to both of you.”
“She's not feeling well.” He had a hint of an accent but there was nothing wrong with his English.
“I'm sorry,” I told him. “Is that why you folks missed Mrs. Delp's funeral?”
I didn't know what it meant or why, but I'd struck a vein with the first swing of the pick. Reggie looked as if I'd slapped him. He studied the wood grain on the front of my desk while he recovered control of his face then, and only then, nodded in answer to the question.
“I hope she feels better soon.”
Reggie nodded again, then looked away like a wall-flower trying to avoid a dance. He might have thought he was going to skate through this interview like the debutante hiding her thick ankles but I didn't have time for it. I needed answers from His Royal Shyness, so I got the cha-cha started. “I understand,” I said, “that you're Reverend Delp's go to guy?”
“We've…” He cleared his throat. “We've been together a long time. I help where I can.”
“You're being modest.” I smiled. “The way I hear it told he can't get along without you.”
Reggie shrugged. “I guess not.”
“So why is he?” He looked up in confusion and, for the first time, looked me in the face. I asked again. “Why is Reverend Delp getting along without you? Why the sabbatical?”
“Rocio and I just needed some time away. That's all.”
Dark End Of The Street by Andrew Madigan
Book excerpt
“You hungry?” she asks.
“Always.”
“Come.”
He follows her through a steel door on the other side of the room.
They’re in a hallway. The floor tiles are old and cracked, the walls could use some paint, and the ceiling needs a little plaster, but the place is clean.
He follows her down the hall, past a row of doors. A mop leans against the wall like an old man taking a cigarette break.
She stops, takes a metal ring out of her pocket, finds the right key without looking, and unlocks a door. “Come. Upstairs.”
The stairs are rickety and the light’s not really pulling his weight, but he walks up.
The door at the top of the stairs is also locked, but she lets them in.
While his hand reaches for the doorknob, Horvath hears a low vibrating sound, like the hum of electrical wires or a transformer box.
He walks into a small vestibule. Just ahead is a doorway leading to a large room with a high ceiling. He steps inside.
There are no overhead lights, but smaller lamps are watching him from various points in the room. There’s natural light, too. Candles and glowing cigarettes.
“I live up here. We all do.”
Horvath looks around. It’s an old warehouse or sweatshop that’s been divided into hundreds of little rooms, maybe more. None of them bigger than the storeroom downstairs, and most of them a lot smaller. Home is definitely the wrong word. Apartment would be an overstatement. Living space, maybe. If you can call it living. Hovel is the word that comes to mind. Some of the more modest compartments don’t even have solid walls. They’re more like glorified chicken coops.
Yardbird by Mark Slade
Book excerpt
The Primrose was the nicest building in Odarko. By nicest, it was always clean, very elegant. A lot of Texas businessmen used the Primrose as a stayover from too many parties, to rest up, or just as a cover story for their wives when they were really at the California Club whoring and boozing. The Primrose had three floors and 110 rooms. All with the same burgundy carpet the lobby had.
There were 110 rooms. Why it stopped on that number is God’s little secret. Inside, each had two small doubles or one queen size. A liquor cabinet, a kitchenette, and a bathroom where the queen of England herself would be proud to powder her nose. They had bellhops and room service that didn’t close until 1am. Wallpaper from Paris, France, depicting the plight of Joan of Arc, and chandeliers from Florence, Italy. Not many townspeople could afford a room at the Primrose.
That’s why it befuddled Scratch that an oil worker could afford to stay in a place like that. A wage of 50 dollars a week didn’t stretch to such accommodations. Usually the men that worked for Reliance stayed at the Courtyard, which was a trailer park. Or Joan Hoss’s Room and Board, which most didn’t, because Miss Hoss didn’t allow beer or booze in her house. Or maybe, if they were lucky, renting a house on the edge of Darktown from Peter Dodd, the local slumlord.
Sure enough, Jerzy left the pass key in the evening paper lying on the sign-in desk. When Scratch entered the lobby, he gave Jerzy a wave. He walked to the desk and Jerzy pointed to the paper.
Scratch placed the paper under his arms, started to walk away and stopped. He leaned on the desk with both elbows.
“Uh, is there any mail for me?” Scratch asked, looked around the nearly empty lobby.
“I’ll check for you, sir,” Jerzy said. He was amused with the charade he and Scratch were carrying in front of practically no one and really, no one cared. Jerzy pretended to look in cubby holes, pulling envelopes and stationary paper out, placing them back.
One big-shot oil man sat in a velvet chair looking at a copy of Life magazine with a girl in her pajamas on the cover. He looked up from the magazine. The fat man wrinkled his nose at Scratch, exhaled a heavy sigh. Scratch smiled back. The oil man shifted uneasily in his chair and flipped the pages of the magazine like he was angry at the world.
“No sir,” Jerzy said. “I’m afraid not.”
Murderous Passions (Turner Hahn And Frank Morales Crime Mysteries Book 1) by B.R. Stateham
Book excerpt
Where to begin next?
I decided to go find Dr. Karen Murphy. Murphy and Holdridge were in the same department, and it occurred to me that as vindictive and acerbic as the victim could be to his peers, the idea of a woman heading his department in what normally is a man's field of intellectual endeavor, would be a prime source of irritation for both parties.
I found the good doctor deep in the basement of the building, in a laboratory, sitting on a high bar stool peering into a microscope. So, for the second time in this investigation I was surprised at what I found. What I expected was a woman in her sixties, wearing glasses and looking through lenses about the thickness of coke bottles, hair streaked with gray, uncombed and possessing the personality of a Komodo dragon.
What I found was someone quite different in complexion and construction.
Karen Murphy was, maybe, in her late thirties or early forties. She did have patches of gray around her temples, but the shoulder length hair was mostly raven black, combed back behind her head and neatly bundled up into one long ponytail. I watched her sitting on that tall wooden stool. Her white smock was open. I could see the red and green plaid skirt she was wearing. She was also wearing bobby socks, white bobby socks pulled up over her ankles and halfway up her calves, with comfortable looking shoes on petite feet. She wore glasses, but not the thick lens affairs. Her glasses were wire-rimmed, and for now, pushed up on her forehead as she sat curled over the microscope, peering intently at something. She had on a dark maroon pull-over sweater and a quick glance at her left hand told me there was no wedding band.
While I would not call Dr. Karen Murphy beautiful, nevertheless she did not look like a physicist, nor someone strong enough to stand up in front of a curmudgeon like the murder victim and come out an equal in the debate.
“If you've brought the slides I wanted, Thomas, just lay them down on the counter and I'll get to them in a moment or two.”
“Sorry,” I said, closing the door to the lab behind me and grinning, “but I'm afraid I'm here on different business.”
She looked up from her microscope with a quick, violent jerk of her head, sending the black-haired ponytail flying across one shoulder in the process. Dark, violet-blue eyes blinked at me a couple of times after she reached up and dropped her wire-rimmed glasses down off her brow.
“And who are you?”
“Detective Sergeant Turner Hahn, Southside Division. It's about Dr. Holdridge.”
“What about Walter?”
“You haven't heard?”
Looking For Henry Turner (Mo Gold And Birdie Mysteries Book 1) by W.L. Liberman
Book excerpt
Aida Turner kept a two-bedroom flat on Symington Avenue not far from the Junction, a run-down crossroads of industrial wasteland mixed with dilapidated residences, a stone’s throw from the barren emptiness of the railway lands. Earlier waves of immigration brought Ukrainians, Macedonians, Croatians, Serbs and Poles looking for a better life.
This section of the city had never seen good times. The bosses of the foundries, the mills and the wire factories liked to keep their workers close by. They felt they could get more out of them that way and they did, working them to death on land polluted with lead and iron. The stench from the tanning factories and meat packing plants lay like a thick, sour slab. Home to the largest stockyards in the country and I swore I could hear the cattle lowing in fear just as they were being slaughtered.
Fifty years ago, the district had such a serious drinking problem with the workingmen flooding the bars and taverns after their shifts that it voted to go dry after Prohibition. It remained dry ever since. The bars closed and Methodist churches took their place scraping some respectability out of the industrial waste that had been left behind.
Aida Turner’s flat occupied the main floor of a row house at 263 Symington, above Bloor Street but below Dupont Avenue, light years away from Mrs. Lawson’s residence, I guessed. At seven-thirty that evening, we paid her a visit. The flat looked small but cozy. She kept it spick and span. A chain-link fence and a well-oiled gate led to a recently swept walk up to the front door. The flat had a decent-sized living room and a faux fireplace, a working kitchen with fitted appliances, a threadbare but clean and well-maintained carpet in the living room, two small bedrooms at the back, the larger of the two was clearly Henry’s. It overlooked a small garden. Compact, but neat, the grass raked, flower beds clean where roses and hydrangeas bloomed, a large sunflower perched on either side of the bed with some hosta filling in the blanks. A tiny oasis surrounded by rotting vegetation. I nodded my approval.
“Nice garden.” I stood in her kitchen gazing out the back window. “I like a bit of gardening myself, find it relaxing, eases the strain of the day.”
“Do you get many stressful days, Mr. Gold?”
I looked at her and smiled, like she was telling me that the stress of losing her son could not be equaled. “I’ve had my share---we both have--depends what’s on the burner, if you know what I mean, Mrs. Turner.”
Soul Man by John Selby
Book excerpt
The welcoming glow beckoned at the tunnel’s far end. It radiated peace, tranquility, love, along with warmth and light.
What do I do now? We’re not given instructions…
Yes, I joked. Humor had always been my favored coping strategy. My apparent death had not changed that.
I hesitated.
I can’t go. I must take care of my kids…
The light called. I took a step forward. Then another. My pace was very deliberate.
How am I walking? This has to be my imagination.
I was in no hurry to recognize the reality of what seemed so absurd. Yet I continued onward. The beacon became so brilliant, I paused and closed my eyes for a moment. Dizziness instantly overcame me. Then once again, complete darkness.
My eyes opened. A deep fog replaced the bright, singular light. Gradually, the mist cleared and resolved into a scene.
In front of me was the BMW. Only the color was off. A reddish-brown streak flowed down the door. On the ground next to it, bleeding profusely, was me—or rather my body. Beside it, a growing pool of red on black mixed with pure white of the falling snow. But the snow wasn’t white, but greenish-gray.
There you go: the best hard-boiled detective novels from Next Chapter in 03/2023. We hope you enjoy the stories - and if you do, please leave a comment below, or a review in Goodreads or your favorite store. It would mean a lot to us!
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