Noir Fiction: Dark Highways

by Paul Duncan

Pocket Essentials is a dynamic series of books that are concise, lively, and easy to read. Packed with facts as well as expert opinions, each book has all the key information you need to know about such popular topics as film, television, cult fiction, history, and more. The literary style of noir both influenced and was influenced by its cinematic equivalent, film noir. Both document the adventures of hard-boiled detectives and double-crossing dames, and often feature a backdrop of corruption and ambiguity and twisted storylines that leave the characters confused and adrift. As well as the quintessential noir authors James M. Cain and James Ellroy, you can read about such lesser known British innovators as Gerald Kersh and Derek Raymond, both of whom have written landmark novels in the development of noir fiction. As well as having an introductory overview, 9 of the most significant authors in the history of noir fiction are profiled in depth. Additionally, there's a handy reference section for readers who want to know more.

Genres: Noir, Nonfiction, Crime

76 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2000

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very short (90 pages) but surprisingly full review of 'noir fiction'. 'Noir' is not to be confused with the 'hard boiled' stories that made up the bulk of film noir as most of us have experienced it. Do not expect to see Chandler or Hammett in the canon: Duncan is good at explaining why.

This is about darker stuff - mid-twentieth century advertising copywriters, scriptwriters, journalists and even bums with pretty roughed up lives telling a few home truths about our species and our society whilst trying, unsuccessfully for the most part, to exorcise their own demons.

It starts with Dostoyevsky and Conrad and pretty well goes downhill in terms of cynicism, violence and misery from that point on taking in some writers we will probably all know (Camus, Cain, Thompson, Ellroy) with others that we should (Bardin, Gresham, Karp, Stevens, Raymond).

Seventeen American, British and French writers (plus the aforementioned Russian and Anglo-Pole) are covered through access to a key work, a brief biography and an account of their larger literary corpus. The French get Camus and Vian.

Duncan links the writers to a loose chronological scheme in which emotions, such as depression for the 1930s, fear for the 1940s, paranoia for the 1950s, apathy for the 1960s and 1970s and amorality for the author's present (to 2000) help to make each writer a creature of their time.

The common denominator is a sense of profound alienation from the rest of the human species and distrust of its moral claims. This is the writing (other than true crime) that most deals with the potential horror implicit in none of us knowing other minds.

Much of it is a variation on a basic theme about which Duncan writes with feeling (the book seems quite personal at times). This is the 'immobilised man' who, on this side of the millennium, sounds uncannily like the popular uncaring description of the 'incel' today.

The book is best read than described. We can see how the black novel might be developed for our time based on the emotion of terror (for society and women in particular) but we suspect our lily-livered liberal publishers dare not publish further. There certainly seems a gap in the market.

The 'immobilised man' today seems to have learned how to mobilise himself into individual acts of mayhem. What was the lurching stomach of what might happen seems to have become a matter of things actually happening and perhaps a social 'terror' of encouraging it by recognising it.

The 'immobilised man' - once stuck within four walls feeding on his own despair, a despair that leads to death or suicide, imagined or real - was in Dostoyevsky's 'Notes from the Underground' in the 1860s. He will still be here in the 2060s as, no doubt silent, he was in the 1760s.

All our attempts to consign him into nothingness by self-censoring our reading just because some men could imagine him into a place on the page as facets of themselves will not eliminate him or those of his drives or anti-drives present in many men (and women) and in society as a whole.

This is a tale largely of men (linked to mobility, economic depression and war) but I am not convinced that there are not women who are equally 'immobilised', only that publishers never sought or found the market. Perhaps Highsmith comes closest in sensibility.

The genre creates the question for us of whether it is better to know or not know of the existence of the dark. Was Plato right about art? Are these writers a danger to society or do they provide 'catharsis'? Would their social elimination by liberal totalitarian thinking be the greater danger?

I keep an open mind but tend to the view that to recognise the darkness is to start to find ways of dealing with it but also that the truly dark novel goes beyond the crime, true crime or even horror novel in one respect that can be potentially dangerous to the sanity of writer and reader alike.

The crime, true crime and horror novel are expressions of the 'other', something we fear but is 'over there'. Someone else is dealing with it (maybe just the writer) to ensure that it can only come to us as either fantasy or a tale of the lives of others. We can empathise and go home cathartised.

The truly dark novel may be a story (a fiction) but it is not 'over there' and it is not 'other'. It is looking inward not at the crimes of others but at the emotions we have and then taking them towards violence and crime, suicide and murder, loneliness and self-destruction.

The consequently created fear and loathing within 'noir fiction' (if it is doing its job) arises not from the acts of others but from the acts of someone who could be us in certain circumstances - that person inveigled by history into becoming a guard at an extermination camp perhaps.

The loathing is turned onto others because the others are the ones creating the conditions that make a man (mostly the writer) loathsome to himself - much as an 'incel' might blame society as much as God for an erotic pecking order that excludes him from pleasure and love.

Of course, in reality, we mostly become loathsome because we choose loathsomeness or are lazy in allowing ourselves to be sucked into the condition that makes us loathsome. Some of us are just natural psychopaths but there is a measure of truth in the implicit 'noir' social analysis.

If we are the product of our actions (which is the view of some existentialists) and if our actions are dictated by our social condition and if our general condition is truly awful, then there is a certain logic in our actions being dictated by our condition caused by others.

Whoever we are becomes lost somehow in the sheer weight of circumstance. The 'noir' novel is thus not about redemption or heroic transcendence but one of acceptance of our trapped state and a refusal to internalise social ideology. It floats constantly in and out of psychopathy.

The ambiguity here is that we have moved beyond ethics and morality to simple descriptions of animal survival (and often failure) in an equally animal world where the social analysis can sometimes be horrible, factually correct. It is, literally, a world beyond good and evil.

On balance, 'noir' fiction is almost necessary in a free society. Its absence is a sign of a totalitarian culture being present or (as today by stealth) re-emerging or it means that there has been a resolution of the conditions that create the 'immobilised man'. Yeah, right!

The 'noir' novel reminds us that, for all the propagandistic crud produced by a liberal society, the resolution of the conditions that create personal misery and despair have not been resolved. The relative lack of such novels today is merely a sign of a wilful denial of this truth.

Personally I am glad to be reminded of reality much as I might be very pleased that Claude Lanzmann pushed my nose into the cesspits of Auschwitz in his documentary 'Shoah' but my survival depends on remaining largely settled in the fantasies that we have all built up together.

A society that understands the abattoir that provides its meat, the cost of war and the crimes committed by all sides and the ever-presence at the margins of the serial killer is ironically more likely to resolve conditions than one in denial. 'Noir' could thus be said to serve a social purpose.

[G. Salter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Does a grand job of explaining what noir is, how it's connected to Gothic novels and hard-boiled novels, and gives an eclectic connection of little-known as well as famous noir writers.
Particularly interesting if you want information on William Lindsay Gresham, Gerald Kersch or Robert William Arthur Cook (aka Derek Raymond).

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fine quick overview. I learned a lot and now have an extensive list of obscure noir novels I want to read.

[Joe Noir · Rating 4 out of 5]

Handy, cool reference.