Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Usage examples of "hard-edged".
A debonair Etonian, Steed oozes charm, wit and - when he chooses to -- hard-edged, steely menace.
To my left, I felt Fiddleback as a hard-edged crystal pulsating with dark colors and darker emotions.
His accent was similar to the southern one of Tad Hansard, gentle against the hard-edged mid-U.
Athwart the midst of that window of the west a blade of cloud, hard-edged and jagged with teeth coloured as of live coals and dead, fiery and iron-dark in turn, stretched like a battered sword.
In him, Spade's hard-edged, cryptic cynicism and Marlowe's moral romanticism are replaced with a sort of sympathetic applied psychology.
But for a second she might have been able to make out the facial features, and it might have been the hard-edged face of a woman.
As I dressed in the mirror that night, I suffered the hard-edged conviction that someone else was wearing my sleeve and that I had been reduced to the role of a passenger in the observation car behind the eyes.
Mysteries can range from English drawing-room puzzle stories to hard-edged, realistic police procedurals, for example.