READING IN THE DARK
Why read noir fiction? The drama of humans and sin.
Traveling with a likable but flawed protagonist down an inevitable, unavoidable, inescapable pathway is what makes noir fiction so compelling.
“They threw me off the hay truck about noon.” The first line of “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” James M. Cain’s brilliant 1934 novel, captures so much of why we read noir fiction. Who are “they” and why they are manhandling the narrator? Why is the narrator on a hay truck and where is he going?
To a bad end, as it turns out, and not alone. Traveling with the generally likable, even admirable, but badly flawed protagonist down the inevitable, unavoidable, inescapable pathway to hell is what makes noir fiction so compelling. Reading noir is something like watching a tragic auto accident: We may not want to look, but we can’t look away.
So if you’re new to noir fiction, start with Cain, either “Postman” or his also brilliant “Double Indemnity” (serialized in 1936, published in book form in 1943). From Cain jump to Jim Thompson, either “The Killer Inside Me” (1952), “The Getaway” (1958), or “The Grifters” (1963). You may have seen one or more of the ensuing movies, but the books are better — and darker.
Perhaps no other American writer understood the criminal mind better than Thompson or better conveyed that understanding to the reader. As he wrote in “Pop. 1280” (1964), his “true masterpiece,” according to Stephen Marche for NPR, “Practically every fella that breaks the law has a danged good reason, to his own way of thinking, which makes every case exceptional, not just one or two. Take you, for example.”
There are good reasons Geoffrey O’Brien, author of “Hardboiled America: The Lurid Years of Paperbacks” (1981), called Thompson a “Dimestore Dostoevsky” and Robert Polito used “Savage Art” as the main title of his Edgarwinning 1995 biography of Thompson.
Noir differs from its equally tough but less nihilistic sibling, hardboiled fiction. Noir — a product of the Great Depression and first one world war, then a second — requires something more than scenes of mental and physical toughness and the slinging of colorful slang by criminals, cops and private eyes.
Raymond Chandler, who created genre-defining private eye Philip Marlowe and helped found the hardboiled school of American crime fiction, hinted at the distinction. In his seminal
essay “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944), he wrote: “In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”
There Chandler hit on the crucial difference between hardboiled and noir fiction: Both have the quality of redemption, but in hardboiled fiction that quality partakes of pity and irony. In noir fiction, the quality partakes of — it is — tragedy. Hardboiled fiction is dark, and so is noir fiction, but in noir at least one character, almost always the protagonist, suffers tragedy of his or her own making. Badly wanting that character to avoid tragedy while
knowing all along that he or she won’t is what draws us to noir and holds us there, even after the action is over.
The ancient Greeks knew that. In their tragedies the protagonists all make a fatal mistake in judgment — Aristotle calls it “harmartia” in his “Poetics” — that leads to their downfall. Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights knew it too. In their own tragedies the protagonists, often great in many ways, all have a major flaw that ultimately proves fatal. Think of Hamlet with his maddening (and mad?) hesitation to act, a delay that proves deadly to so many.
And writers of noir fiction know it as well as — or better than — anyone and are capable of distilling the essence of noir into a single dark sentence. If “Postman” has one of the best opening lines in noir, “Fast One” (1933) by a different Cain — Paul Cain, a pen name for the mysterious George Sims — has one of the best last lines. At the end of “Fast One,” protagonist Gerry Kells (spoiler alert) crawls away from his dead lover, Granquist, and sinks down under an overhanging rock, where, “after a little while, life went away from him.”
The 1960s — the height of the Cold War — were generally better years for spy novels than noir fiction, but in 1970 noir got a big boost from “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” by George V. Higgins. This “Friends” is arguably the best American crime novel of the 20th century, and its dialoguedriven narration heavily influenced many crime writers, including the legendary Elmore Leonard, who wrote, “I finished the book in one sitting and felt as if I’d been set free. So this was how you do it. … To me it was a revelation.”
Noir fiction continued to thrive in the 1980s and 1990s. For example, James Ellroy, whose creative use of jazz terminology, copspeak and period-appropriate slang earned him the nickname “Demon Dog of Crime Fiction,” published three of his 1980s novels as “L.A. Noir” in 1997. Vicki Hendricks, the “Queen of Noir,” published her first novel, “Miami Purity,” in 1995. The tale is her compelling, erotically charged take on what James M. Cain called the “love rack” situation he used in “Postman” and “Double Indemnity.”
Like Chandler, Megan Abbott, whose noir novel “Queenpin” won an Edgar Award in 2008, has written about the distinction between hardboiled and noir works. Abbott, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on American crime fiction (published in book form as “The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film”), says that at the end of a hardboiled story, “everything is a mess, people have died, but the hero has done the right thing or close to it, and order has, to a certain extent, been restored. … Noir is different. In noir, everyone is fallen, and right and wrong are not clearly defined and maybe not even attainable.”
That is why noir fiction fascinates us and will continue to do so. We know that all of us are fallen, and we see in the sins of others the sins within ourselves. As Bill Ruehlmann, long a writer for these newspapers, says in “Saint With a Gun: The Unlawful American Private Eye” (1974), reading detective stories is “a purgative for guilt,” and he quotes W.H. Auden’s observation that the typical reader of such stories “suffers from a sense of sin.” For all the differences between detective fiction and noir, this is a compelling shared trait.
There is a reason for the phrase “dark as sin.” Chandler, in his short story “Trouble Is My Business” (1939), says in the plain and direct prose that suits most crime fiction, certainly noir: “The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night.”