ON WRITING NOIR
I was a member of a noir fiction discussion
group for years where every six months or so we’d debate what constitutes noir
fiction. If you search on the Internet for definitions of noir you’ll find at
least a dozen contrasting ones. So I need to first define noir, at least my view
of it, before I can talk about how to write it. The best definition that I’ve come
across (that best fits my own view of noir) comes from Otto Penzler, which was
originally published in his THE BEST AMERICAN
NOIR OF THE CENTURY:
"Noir
is about losers. The characters in these existential, nihilistic tales are
doomed. They may not die, but they probably should, as the life that awaits
them is certain to be so ugly, so lost and lonely, that they'd be better off
just curling up and getting it over with. And, let's face it, they deserve it.
"Pretty
much everyone in a noir story (or film) is driven by greed, lust, jealousy or
alienation, a path that inevitably sucks them into a downward spiral from which
they cannot escape. They couldn't find the exit from their personal highway to
hell if flashing neon lights pointed to a town named Hope. It is their own lack
of morality that blindly drives them to ruin."
In noir, the hero is doomed, but
he's doomed of his own making. Noir isn’t about tragedy, it’s not the fates
conspiring against some poor luckless soul. Instead it’s about our hero sealing
his own fate by crossing a line that can’t be uncrossed. And as with Penzler's definition, the doom isn't necessarily death; for example,
it could be instead psychic disintegration, but however our hero is left at the
end, he’s as good dead given what’s waiting for him. And noir cuts across
classes. For some reason it has become in vogue among certain mystery writers
to say noir “is a working class tragedy”. That’s wrong on both the tragedy
level and the working class-level. There are many good examples of noir
protagonists coming from the wealthy (HOW LIKE A GOD by Rex Stout, and many
Cornell Woolrich novels), the more affluent middleclass (ANYONE’S MY NAME
by Seymour Shubin, KILLER INSIDE ME
by Jim Thompson), middleclass (DOUBLE INDEMNITY by James
M. Cain), criminal class (THE NAME OF THE GAME
IS DEATH by Dan Marlowe), and every
other possible class.
PSYCHO NOIR
Psycho noir in literature is
fiction that fits the noir definition, but also has the additional property that
the noir protagonist’s perceptions and rationalizations are just off center
enough to send him to hell. Jim
Thompson wrote psycho noir better than anyone, and some of his best include
HELL OF A WOMAN, KILLER INSIDE ME, A SWELL-LOOKING BABE and POP. 1280. Most psycho noir novels use an unreliable narrator
which I’ll talk about later.
NOIROTICA
Noir erotica or noirotica is
another specific type of noir fiction which was pioneered by Top Suspense
Group’s own Vicki Hendricks. Before
Vicki’s groundbreaking 1995 novel, MIAMI PURITY, women in noir novels were mostly either
femme fatales who lured the noir protagonist to his doom (or in some case,
falling into the abyss with him), innocents who serve as a counterpoint to the
femme fatales, or victims. MIAMI PURITY changed all that by having the noir
protagonist as a woman. Lust and sex have played a role in many noir novels, but
MIAMI
PURITY raised the ante dramatically with its graphic sexual explicitness and
showing more kinkiness than you’d find in any ten Dan Marlowe
novels! And of course, the sex and lust is shown from a woman’s perspective.
Vicki’s noir novels opened the door for other women noir writers, notably Megan Abbott and Christa Faust, but Vicki was the
first, and in my mind, the best.
NEO-NOIR
If you write noir today, your books
are going to be called neo-noir. So what is neo-noir? This is a term that came
about to describe modern film noir; films that are more self-consciously noir
and employ more modern themes. As far as noir literature goes, there’s no
difference between noir and neo-noir other than you get to look cooler by
calling your writing ‘neo-noir’.
WHY WRITE NOIR?
So now that we have our definition
of noir, the question you need to ask yourself is why do you want to write noir
given that many of the great noir writers like Jim
Thompson, David Goodis, Gil Brewer and Dan Marlowe
all died broke. Most readers out
there do not want to read true noir. They might be willing to accept something
that has a noirish feel, but they still want a happy ending, or at least an
ending with hope, and there’s no hope in noir.
So knowing that there’s a limited readership for noir, that many mystery
readers who stumble on your book are going to be appalled by it, and that
you’re behind the eight ball before you even start looking for a publisher, why
write noir?
I’ll give my answer by explaining
why I love to read noir. The best noir can be a far more exhilarating
experience than you can find reading almost any other kind of mystery or crime
fiction, and the reason for this is it can expose truths about the human
condition that other genre fiction barely hints at. There’s a resonance in the
best noir fiction that’s almost impossible to find elsewhere in genre fiction.
FORMULA
FOR PLOTTING A NOIR NOVEL
Here’s a simple formula you can use
for plotting your next noir novel:
Have your noir protagonist cross a
moral line where there’s no turning back from. This might be committing a murder,
robbery, betrayal, cowardice or anything else that you can think of which will
ultimately doom your noir hero.
Keep putting your hero in increasingly
more dire situations that he is barely able to escape from, and repeat this
until the tension becomes unbearable.
Give your noir hero a thin ray of
hope of escaping his situation. The hope might be real or might be a mirage or
might be only a feverish delusion on the part of your hero, but to him it’s
very real.
Just as it looks like he might
escape his doom, pull the rug out from under your noir hero’s feet and send him
tumbling into the abyss.
The above formula describes most
(if not all) of the noir books I’ve read. In some books, the noir hero has
already crossed that moral line before the book ever starts. In others, he’s
born broken and also has no hope from the beginning. But in one way or another,
this formula tends to hold.
THE NOIR PROTAGONIST
So who is the noir protagonist? Are
there any specific traits they have in common? The answer: our noir heroes can
be anyone, and the only thing they have in common is that they’re doomed of
their own making. Here are some examples of noir protagonists taken from
classic noir novels.
A middle-class insurance salesman.
An everyman, whose major character flaw is he thinks he’s smarter than he
really is. This is Walter Huff from James M.
Cain’s DOUBLE INDEMNITY. What lures
him to his doom is ostensibly lust and money, but it’s really the challenge of
getting away with the crime and outsmarting those around him.
A deputy in a small Texas town, where his father
was the town doctor. The deputy is highly intelligent and has an upper
middleclass existence thanks to the inheritance from his dad. He suffered a
traumatic sexual experience as a teenager due to his father’s overreaction to
it, and that has created a sickness in him. This is Lou Ford from Jim Thompson’s A KILLER INSIDE ME, and he’s an example of a character who’s been
broken before the novel begins.
A down-and-out door-to-door salesman
who’s got a million excuses for why things have never worked, and why he’s been
stuck with an endless series of tramps. This is Frank “Dolly” Dillon from Jim Thompson’s HELL OF A WOMAN,
and what lures him is lust and money, but even more, a desperation to finally
be a success. This is one of Thompson’s best psycho noir novels.
A bellboy who had been a college
student set on medical school, but had to put his plans on hold due to his
father losing his job as a college professor. This is Bill “Dusty” Rhodes from Jim
Thompson’s A SWELL-LOOKING BABE. This is yet another psycho noir novel from
Thompson where the Rhodes ended up broken
somewhere as a child, and what ultimately does him in is an unnatural sexual
obsession with his adopted mother.
A hardened and vicious bank robber
who loves dogs and is out for vengeance. This is Chet Arnold (later Earl Drake)
from Dan Marlowe’s THE NAME OF THE GAME
IS DEATH
A well-to-do young man working as a
stock broker and engaged to a beautiful young woman. This is Prescott Marshall from Cornell Woolrich’s FRIGHT.
A guy who owns a small TV shop.
This is Jack Ruxton from Gil Brewer’s THE VENGEFUL VIRGIN. What lures Ruxton to
his noir fate is lust and money, particularly money.
A young, college-educated writer
for true crime magazines, and married to a beautiful, idealistic woman. This is
Paul Weiler from Seymour Shubin’s
ANYONE’S MY NAME.
What lures Weiler is sex with a woman he doesn’t find particularly attractive, and
what ultimately dooms him is his fear of exposure.
A used car salesman turned
filmmaker. This is Richard Hudson from Charles Willeford’s THE WOMAN CHASER, and what sends Hudson tumbling into the abyss is a mixture
of hubris and being unwilling to compromise on his artistic vision.
As you can see from my small
sampling is that anyone can be a noir protagonist. A hardened criminal, a down-and-out
loser, a lawman, a typical middleclass everyman, a young man of wealth and
potential. In the noir universe, everyone if fallible. Everyone under the right
circumstance can be seduced into crossing that line where there’s no coming
back from.
In psycho noir, it’s a little
different. There the noir protagonist is broken with no hope before the novel
begins. Usually (but not always as with Lou Ford in KILLER INSIDE ME) they’re self-delusional, needing badly to
believe they’re not as fucked up as they are.
FIRST OR THIRD PERSON?
Most
noir novels are written in the first person. Being stuck in the head of a noir
protagonist creates a claustrophobic effect that lends itself to noir. First
person writing creates more of an intimacy with the reader, which can make the
hell the character tumbles into all that more horrifying. But it is not an
absolute. There have been great noir novels written in the third person such as
Woolrich’s FRIGHT, Thompson’s A SWELL-LOOKING BABE, THE GETAWAY and THE
GRIFTERS, to name just a few. Rex Stout even wrote a brilliant noir novel in
the second person, HOW LIKE A GOD.
UNRELIABLE NARRATOR
The unreliable narrator works well
with psycho noir, but only if the noir protagonist is lying as much to himself
as he is to the reader, otherwise it’s a cheat and will lead to an unsatisfactory
read. There has to be a reason why the narrator is unreliable—a defect in his
personality, or possibly he’s so self–delusional that he’s incapable of
recognizing the truth, or it could be that he desperately needs to fool himself
or any other number of reasons. The unreliable narrator can also be very subtle
in his unreliability, and one book that uses this to great advantage is SAVAGE
NIGHT by Jim Thompson. The narrator
in that novel is mostly relaying to the reader the unvarnished truth, but there
is one lie that he desperately needs to hold onto so he can believe that
there’s a hint of decency inside of him, and when the truth is exposed the
effect to the reader is devastating.
THE TORMENTOR
A technique used in several of my
favorite noir novels is to have a tormentor—someone who either suspects or
knows what our noir hero has done, but instead of coming right out and accusing
him, instead only drops hints about it, leaving our noir hero to stew over how
much the person knows. A variant of this is having someone close to our noir
hero—such as a wife—who has suspicions and is dropping hints not because
they’re trying to torment our hero, but because they’re legitimately worried.
And then there’s the accidental tormentor—someone who doesn’t suspect our noir
hero is involved in the crime at the center of the book, but is still able to
torment our hero by asking innocents questions about it.
NOIR EXERCISE
Here’s an exercise to try. Pick any
Ross Macdonald Lew Archer novel,
read it, and think of how it could be rewritten from the guilty party’s
perspective as a noir novel.
READING LIST
I’m including below a reading list
to help expose you to a ten excellent examples of noir fiction.
DOUBLE INDEMNITY
by James M.
Cain
HELL OF A WOMAN,
SAVAGE NIGHT, THE GETAWAY, A SWELL-LOOKING BABE, all by Jim
Thompson
THE WOMAN
CHASER, COCKFIGHTER by Charles Willeford
THE NAME
OF THE GAME IS DEATH by Dan Marlowe
THE VENGEFUL VIRGIN by Gil Brewer
DIRTY SNOW by George Simenon
FRIGHT by Cornell Woolrich
SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER by David
Goodis
ANYONE’S MY
NAME by Seymour Shubin
MIAMI
PURITY by Vicki Hendricks
ROBBIE’S
WIFE by Russell Hill
About Dave Zeltserman. Dave’s crime noir thriller, SMALL
CRIMES, made NPR’s and Washington
Post’s best books of the year list. The Washington Post said of Dave’s crime noir novel, PARIAH: “If there's any
other young writer out there who does crime noir better than Zeltserman, I
don't even want to know.” After publishing 7 crime noir novels, Dave has decided he wants to make some money with
his writing and his now writing mystery and horror fiction, although usually with a nourish sentiment.
