The British detectives were the product of a polite and civilized society, possibly the best the world has ever seen. American “hardboiled” fiction is plain nihilistic, a product of a violent frontier society beset by all kinds of subcultures lusting for unearned wealth to be taken by violence.
America a la the Founding Fathers is great. But that is because it was essentialy BRITISH in origin and highly civilized. The later melting pot of all kinds of mongrelized peoples fighting one another for wealth and power is more like Machiavellian Florence than what George Washington envisioned.
Diversity is NOT your strength.
You're a bigot and uneducated! The FFs were mostly from upper middle/upper classes; they were also mostly exceptionally and UNUSUALLY, for the times, highly educated. They hardly represented the vast majority of the populace of that time.
Those involved in THE WHISKEY REBELLION" were hardly all THAT "civilized"!
Arron Burr was hardly a "civilized" man.
There's diversity and then there DIVERSITY...the latter being what most of today's ILLEGAL invaders are; useless, criminal, and low IQ.
High literature in the person of T. S. Eliot reflected this in his famous line that "April is the cruelest month," which contradicted the traditional pastoral view of spring as a time of hope and renewal. Similarly, William Butler Yeats "Journey of the Magi" begins with a realistic "A cold coming we had of it," and his "The Second Coming" concludes with "What rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem this hour to be born" as a warning of the danger in the waning of Christina faith.
One can, of course, dissent from modernist realism in literature, from poetry to Hemingway to hard-boiled detectives, but it reflects profound disillusionment with long-established literary idioms after the rise of scientific materialism, the extraordinary and so often senseless death and destruction of the First World War, and the sufferings of the Depression. These discredited traditional ideals of nobility, Christian chivalry, and courtly love.
Nevertheless, modern literature -- including hard-boiled detective fiction -- finds a sense of moral purpose in the struggles of individuals caught up in the complex and sometimes brutal demands of modern life. Hemingway, for example, found moral purpose in male heroism against extraordinary physical threats and demands. And the American hard-boiled detective is also a hero, a "man of honor" in the modern city as Chandler put it, in battle against gangsters, crooks, and indifferent and corrupt cops. Usually, the result obtained is only a half-measure of justice, which is the most that modern life commonly permits.
Is the cozy world of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot a better one? Perhaps -- but that is not the world we now live in, if we ever did. The heroes that we must look for are going to be flawed and often down at the heel -- but, as the hard-boiled detective stories indicate, we should be glad to find such heroes when we can.