Hard-boiled Beta

I'm halfway through editing the Beta draft of my next novel, (tentatively) titled: Strawman Made Steel.

It is hard-boiled detective fiction, with a twist. My wife tells me "hard-boiled" puts her in mind of Daffy Duck―needless to say, not the image I was going for. It does concern me that, for many of us, our strongest exposure to the hard-boiled genre is through spoof. It's a pity, because the genre's founding works are marvellous―just pick up and read anything by Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler.

In his famous essay, "The Simple Art of Murder," Chandler takes his English contemporaries to task for dull writing, unrealistic characters and plot. For Chandler, the world of the hard-boiled detective―the world, in fact―is messy and mean, and down its streets "a man must go who himself is not mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid." He also defends the hard-boiled genre against Dorothy Sayer's charge that it could never "attain the loftiest level of literary achievement," but he could just as well have pointed to his novels. Do yourself a favour and buy a collection, e.g., "The Big Sleep and Other Novels"

But here's the question: when you hear the term hard-boiled, what springs to mind? Humphrey Bogart, Daffy Duck ... or breakfast?