hard-boiled

Modifies a noun

• egg: She can put away 552 oysters in 10 minutes, or 52 hard-boiled eggs in just five.
• novel: The hard-boiled crime novel went into decline in the 1960s, killed off by the pop culture, Haut argues.
• detective: At times Wallander seems too much like the traditional hard-drinking, hard-living, hard-boiled detective of old, but he is more than that.
• fiction: It has several sub-genres, including detective fiction ( including the whodunnit ), legal thriller, courtroom drama, and hard-boiled fiction.
• eye: Suddenly, on a sort of velvety background I saw two disembodied eyes, hard-boiled eyes like those of the actor, Peter Lorre.
• style: Burke's writing is the antithesis of the pared-down, hard-boiled style of the American school of crime fiction.