la primera novela negra genuina de los Estados Unidos

20:04 Jan 21, 2016 

So the question is starting to make a little more sense. It's a combination of a Spanish sentence and another from the English Wikipedia.

19:48 Jan 21, 2016 

That's right, and then there are also the dime novels. In truth, I'd always lumped the hardboiled genre in with the noir genre, that is, I'd never heard of "hardboiled" as the name of a genre, but more of a description of the detectives in the noir genre. It wasn't until I'd looked it up that I saw there is a certain difference between the two types. In any case, there is a clear distinction between early crime fiction and the "noir" genre per se, and the asker's text does seem to be dealing with these distinctions and issues, so it might be worth bearing in mind.

Here's an interesting snippet from the Wikipedia entry on the history of crime fiction:
Hard boiled American crime fiction writing
A U.S. reaction, to the cozy conventionality of British murder mysteries, was the American hard-boiled school of crime writing (certain works in the field are also referred to as noir fiction). Writers like Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), Raymond Chandler (1888–1959), Jonathan Latimer (1906–1983), Mickey Spillane (1918–2006), and many others decided on an altogether different, innovative approach to crime fiction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_crime_fiction

19:29 Jan 21, 2016 

In principle you're right, but it seems pretty plain to me from the snippet quoted that negra and hardboiled are being used as synonyms here. I'm not sure crime novel will do, though. I would have thought the first genuine American crime novel (or at least crime fiction) was probably Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue (I've just checked and that was the earliest of his crime stories), which is surely not the kind of thing they're talking about.

19:13 Jan 21, 2016 

Except, as far as I can tell, the "noir" genre is a twist on the "hardboiled" genre, in that the protagonist is no longer the detective, but an even more morally ambiguous character, such as a gangster or someone who is somehow suspect or has a darker past.

18:47 Jan 21, 2016 

We may never know the actual context, but I agree with Robert that it doesn't just mean crime fiction. Wikipedia says:
La novela negra (francés: noir) o hard-boiled es ... **un tipo de** novela policíaca en la que la resolución del misterio no es el objetivo principal y los argumentos son habitualmente muy violentos; la división entre buenos y malos de los personajes se difumina y la mayor parte de sus protagonistas son individuos derrotados y en decadencia en busca de la verdad o, cuando menos, algún atisbo de ella.
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novela_negra

16:30 Jan 21, 2016 

Translating that snippet into Spanish would be tough enough, but the other way round...

16:13 Jan 21, 2016 

You are quite possibly right about that.
Nevertheless, I don't believe "novela negra" refers to the generic term "crime novel", particularly given the "hardboiled" reference, which is another sub-genre of the crime novel (the so-called hardboiled detectives, such as Marlow, etc.).

16:05 Jan 21, 2016 

I'm glad you asked, Simon. I was wondering the same thing. Things like "cozy conventionality" and "hardboiled" don't sound like translations.

15:52 Jan 21, 2016 

The question is very confusing. Is it ES-EN or EN-ES? Is the context given the original text or an attempted translation?

15:38 Jan 21, 2016 

The question seems to be more about whether the adjective goes before or after the noun in English.

15:22 Jan 21, 2016 

Well actually, she doesn't give the previous sentence of the source text, only her translation. In any case, that's surely a question of style which the translator will have to sort out for herself. I was assuming that she wanted to understand the term "novela negra".

15:19 Jan 21, 2016 

In fact I would have expected it to say "ficción" in Spanish. We're talking about a genre, not one particular book.

15:16 Jan 21, 2016 

I'm not sure any of these answers works, because all involve the repetition of "novel" from the previous sentence, which is not good style. The asker has said "fiction", which may be a better solution.
Things are also complicated by not having the Spanish context.
And it's "earthy", not "earthly".