Erica Jong once got all in a dither in the New York Times Book Review over what she called today's "slide forms," so it may be timely to erect firm barriers around the subgenres of mystery to prevent any sliding that can be lamented by people who don't know any better but can be relied upon to vent their ignorance in a respected publication. Therefore, I give you the following:

Hardboiled Novels I Have Known

1. First and foremost, no cats.

2. The protagonist is usually a professional crime solver, henceforth referred to as "the dick."

3. The dick is always a philanthropist who never earns a penny for work. The dick takes on cases because of the heart of gold under the obligatory trenchcoat. The rent on his/her one-room office with the pebbled-glass window in the door is paid as an Act of God, like the lilies of the field.

4. The dick is properly licensed, carrying a wallet-sized credential that grants the dick no rights or privileges and fools no one.

5. The dick is lazy, never working on more than one case at a time.

6. Between spasms of detecting on that one case, the dick consumes quantities of booze that would have made Al Capone so much richer that he could have bought himself a better lawyer to beat that income tax evasion charge.

7. The dick, unlike the amateur detective found in cozies, is armed. If a woman, the dick usually stores her gun in the glove compartment of her car and forgets to take it with her into dangerous situations. I a man, the dick carries his gun in a shoulder harness, and it is mandatory for the author to detail precisely and in ripe detail the amount of perspiration generated by the harness.

8. The dick always has a medical degree. This is obvious because any dick worth a hoot can tell at a glance if the victim is dead. There's none of that "Oh, my God, is he dead?" baloney in hardboiled novels.

9. Blood.

10. The dick must be injured by some relatively benign agency (a fall down a flight of stairs, a good smack on the thumb with the business end of a hammer while repairing the roof, sliding off the roof while cussing the hammer, getting pummelled by a girl gang that has nothing to do with the plot) early in the novel so that the dick's ultimate triumph in the mandatory climactic fight scene is rendered all the more incredible.

11. The rules of hardboiled fiction permit the dick to have active and frequent access to the vocabulary we all learned in fourth grade but have always pretended shocks us.

12. Hardboiled novels take place in big cities. The urban setting is required because only in horrendously expensive inner cities could a dick survive while earning no money, suffering thousands of dollars worth of medical treatment per case, and buying enough booze to keep his/her head boiled. Thus the term (see The Big Concrete Apple Mystery).

Submitted by Polly Whitney, whose head is not boiled but baked.