I have something of a soft spot for noir fiction. It was the sub-genre that first turned me on to the potential of crime fiction to deal with something beyond the solution of a mystery. This was the crime fiction of the dispossessed, the dubious and the dying on their feet. Its voices were forgotten or otherwise ignored in polite society. It had the potential to be more transgressive than any other sub-genre, because it was rooted so defiantly in reality and didn’t have the fantastical gimmickry afforded other genres.
It was, in short, love at first sight.
Over the years, noir fiction has taken its knocks from readers and critics alike, but it’s finally emerged, bloodied but unbowed, to finally reap the rewards promised by the huge readership made possible by the new pulp – digital publishing. No longer will noir be misunderstood by lizard-brained marketing departments or ghettoised by meagre print runs. The pinch-faced biddies of the crime fiction community can no longer dismiss noir simply because of its traditionally poor sales because noir now has the opportunity to connect with a much larger audience than ever before. Yeah, we all know that it’ll never achieve the kind of mainstream acceptance afforded its more straitlaced and prejudice-confirming brothers and sisters, but then that’s a secret relief, because if noir becomes truly acceptable, then it loses its effectiveness as crime fiction’s gimlet-eyed outsider.
It might therefore be a good idea to remind ourselves of the ground rules. Benoit Lelievre ran a series over at Dead End Follies called “Ten Rules To Write Noir”. There were some fantastic pieces – Christa Faust and Sara Gran’s are excellent places to start – but there still seemed to be some disagreement as to the defining characteristic of noir.
You’ll be glad to know that I think I have it. But first, here’s what noir is not.
Noir is not, as Dennis Lehane would have it, “working-class tragedy”. I very much doubt Walter Huff would class his insurance job as blue-collar, and certainly Phyllis Nirdlinger wasn’t hurting for a few bob when the pair of them conspired to murder Mr Nirdlinger. While the traditional audience for noir fiction in the pulps was more than likely working class, in noir the upper and middle classes have just as much of a voice as the working poor and underclass.
Noir is not about one man railing against a wicked, venal world. In the best noir, the world is absolutely fine and dandy, thanks for asking. There’s nothing inherently terrible about the world in the work of Thompson, Cain or Goodis other than it spawned the protagonists. The power is in the disparity between protagonist and his setting. Any unpleasant scenery is the reflection of an inner turmoil, not the direct cause of it.
Noir is not about an external struggle. In great noir, just as in great tragedy, the struggle is internal. It’s Lou Ford desperately struggling to keep his “sickness” in check, John Sharp’s struggling with his sexuality and its effect on his singing, Jim Cassidy struggling with his self-destructive lust for Mildred. As the gurus say, plot comes from character, and nowhere is this more evident than in noir fiction.
Noir is about restraint. That might seem weird, considering the level of violence and depravity on display, but chances are, the violence is given time to simmer before it boils over and the depravity is confined within the protagonist’s head. You can’t have tension without restraint. Without restraint, you have little more than a Punch and Judy show. Sure, the kids will love it, but it won’t stick and it ultimately won’t matter.
Noir is not fedoras, femmes fatales or fog. Those are the clichés of film noir, which is a very different beast indeed. At best, they’re window dressing; at worst, lazy writing. Noir fiction has always been modernist fiction, and what few references can be found are contemporaneous. As a result, the truly great noir fiction hasn’t aged a bit.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, noir is not crime fiction written by pessimists. And I have a special guest to tell you all why. At Bouchercon 2008, Eddie Muller delivered a commentary on the state of noir. The following summer, that commentary was printed in the Noir City Sentinel as “Noir for a New Century”, and in it Muller nails the defining characteristic of noir – compassion.
“Noir does not call for ironic detachment. It calls for the ultimate commitment: a willingness to go to the darkest places and remain compassionate in the face of hopelessness.”
Amen. The great noir writers – Cain, McCoy, Thompson, Goodis, Williams, Willeford – cared about their protagonists. And despite what the movies may have told you, they had compassion for their femmes fatales too – Cain’s Cora, Phyllis and Juana are just as lost as Frank, Walter and John. And because they cared, their readers cared. It’s impossible for a reader to get into a character’s head if the writer hasn’t been there first.
Compassion. An empathetic connection. The reason we read fiction over non-fiction.
That’s not to say other sub-genres don’t have their fair share of compassion, but I’d argue that noir fiction is the only one that is defined by it. As the most marginal of sub-genres, so it deals with the most marginal of people and, without compassion, their stories would be nothing more than a series of unfortunate events. It’s the reason why pessimists can’t write decent noir – they lack compassion, or they avoid it because compassion may throw up something that contradicts the relentless cynicism that informs their worldview. It’s also difficult for a pessimist to fully commit to an optimistic protagonist. And noir protagonists, despite their bluster and moan, are the most optimistic protagonists in fiction. They have to be. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t have a story. And the ending to that story would be bleak as opposed to tragic.
So I really only have one rule for writing noir – write with compassion. Do that, and I guarantee you that yours will be one of the few contemporary noirs I don’t throw across the room.
RAY BANKS is the author of the Cal Innes novels and, most recently, Dead Money. He grudgingly updates his own website at The Saturday Boy but spews most of his invective over on Twitter. This final sentence is where he’d normally tell some quirky lie to make himself sound all hardboiled and shit, but he really can’t be fucking chewed.