The genre of crime fiction in American literature and film covers a wide variety of styles and subgenres, but certain elements can be identified as being especially identified with American crime fiction. The private detective or private eye is the character most associated with American crime fiction, and as the private detective developed, he was part of a larger form known as the hardboiled school which referred to an attitude of toughness and cynicism that might be expressed by a policeman or lawyer as well as a private detective, though the private detective is the primary embodiment of the hardboiled school. Many of these novels and films use the private detective himself as the filter through which the rest of the story is told, either because he (and they were overwhelmingly male until recently) tells the story in the first-person or as narrator or because he…