The originator of that style was Dashiell Hammett and to a lesser extent Carroll John Daly. They both started writing these type of stories in the 1920s and publishing them in the American pulp magazine Black Mask. Hammett based his writing on his own experience working as a private eye for the Pinkerton Agency in San Francisco. Hammett wanted to capture the vernacular language he heard criminals and detectives speak on the job in his stories. Hammett's character Sam Spade (memorably placed by Humphrey Bogart in the film version of The Maltese Falcon) is the the archetype of all the hardboiled detectives who came afterwards.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/254914/hard-boiled-fiction

hi! it might be worth x-posting this to /r/AskLiteraryStudies