Gone Tomorrow

Lee Child has steadily accrued one of the keenest groups of admirers for any contemporary thriller writer – and the reason is easy to discern. In such gritty and authoritative novels as Tripwire, Killing Floor and Die Trying, Child established his tough itinerant protagonist Jack Reacher as a key modern hero, with a taciturn, hard-boiled appeal that has not palled over many books (though some have queried Jack’s transformation from a man who triumphed -- with difficulty – over insuperable odds – into a nigh-invulnerable super-hero).

Unless the Threat of Death is Behind Them - Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir

Early in the twentieth century a new character type emerged in the crime novels of American writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler: the "hard-boiled" detective, most famously exemplified by Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Unlike the analytical detectives of nineteenth-century fiction, such as Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin, the new detectives encountered cases not as intricate logical puzzles but as stark challenges to manhood.

The Long Goodbye

The Long Goodbye is a 1953 novel by Raymond Chandler, centered on his famous detective Philip Marlowe. While some consider it not on the level of The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely, others rank it as the best of his work. Chandler himself, in a letter to a friend, called the novel "my best book" and recalled the agony of writing it while his wife was terminally ill.
The novel is notable for using hard-boiled detective fiction as a vehicle for social criticism, as well as for including autobiographical elements from Chandler's life. In 1955, the novel received the Edgar Award for Best Novel.