Research: What is Noir and What it Isn't

My search for a definition of noir arose after I read the first books by two authors who appear on lists of Nordic noir. While perfectly acceptable crime stories, I didn’t find anything in them noir. When I started looking at what constitutes noir I discovered almost immediately that I was guilty of putting hard-boiled and noir stories as the same sub-genre. In fact, I was pretty liberal as to what I called noir.

One of the first articles that popped up in my internet search—see links below for much better and more detailed analysis— was Otto Penzler’s “Noir Fiction is About Losers, Not Private Eyes”. Now Penzler has some serious credentials. He is the proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan which, according to Wikipeida is…”the oldest and largest mystery specialist bookstore in the world”. Penzler “is regarded as the world’s foremost authority on crime, mystery and suspense fiction” and has edited a huge number of crime fiction books.

Penzler pretty much engraves in stone what noir fiction is and isn’t thus his isn’t a opinion that can be dismissed easily. Indeed, I realized I had felt this all along even if I didn’t know enough to voice it.

Noir fiction has attracted some of the best writers in the United States (mostly) and many of its aficionados are among the most sophisticated readers in the crime genre. Having said that, I am constantly baffled by the fact that a huge number of these readers don’t seem to know what noir fiction is. When they begin to speak of their favorite titles in the category, they invariably include a preponderance of books and short stories that are about as noir as strawberry shortcake.

UPDATE
Here is another quote from Penzler that I like

“Like art, love, and pornography, noir is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. For the purposes of the book and my longtime working understanding and definition of it, noir stories are bleak, existential, alienated, pessimistic tales about losers--people who are so morally challenged that they cannot help but bring about their own ruin.”

― Otto Penzler, The Best American Noir of the Century
/UPDATE

Noir evolved from the hard-boiled detectives that Dashiell Hammett defined in Black Mack Magazine in the 1920s. The hard-boiled detective might be tough and use questionable means but at the end of the day has a moral center, a code of ethics. Even Sam Spade, who is a bit morally ambiguous, recognizes that when someone kills your partner you do something about it even if you are sleeping with your partner’s wife. Chandler famously wrote about the detective:

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

For Penzler, “noir is about losers”. Noir stories are existential and nihilistic and the characters doomed because they lack morality. “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.”

Penzler unequivocally says that the hard-boiled and noir sub-genres of crime fiction are philosophically opposed to each other.

One is dependent on its hero maintaining the ethical high ground while most everyone with whom he interacts lies, charts, steals and kills. The other features people who wallow in the sty that is their world.The machinations of their lust, whether for money or love (which in noir fiction is a four-letter word for sex), will cause them to be blinded to rudimentary decency as they become entangled in the web of their own doom.

There are no happy endings in noir.

By now you might be having unsettling thoughts about our beloved crime fiction, what have I been reading. Hammett’s Maltese Falcon and the Continental Op stories and Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, as dark as they might be, are not noir. I’d always thought it incongruous that these books appeared on the same lists with books by Jim Thompson and James M. Cain. Walter Neff in Double Indemnity and Lou Ford in The Killer Inside me are noir figures, not Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.

Dave Zeltserman sums it up nicely:

What makes these noir novels such fascinating reads are the ways in which they open up the human psyche and leave bare the dark impulses that can drive us to do the unthinkable. What makes them such exhilarating and dread-inducing reads is being sucked into the noir protagonist’s private hell, and hoping he can somehow escape the abyss waiting for him while knowing there’s no escape.

Given all this, did two of my favorite crime writers, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, write noir, since the term is often ascribed to their works? Simple answer,no. They wrote tough, hard-boiled crime fiction, and while there’s a darkness to their book and stories, none of it is noir. In Chandler’s case, Philip Marlowe might uncover others’ sins, but he always lives to fight another day.

You might be asking, as I did, wait,isn’t it possible to have a noir detective? It seems like their must be but I can only think of one from recent reading. PI Jake Blake in Charles Williford’s Wild Wives begins his downward spiral because of a woman and money. Ray Banks suggests the PI Harry Angel in William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel which features which features murder, mystery, and the occult and maybe a crossover with horror. He also thinks that Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor novels constitute a noir cycle.

In his article, 'Writing in the Darkness: the World of Cornell Woolrich', Eddie Duggan further distinguishes between hard-boiled and noir:

The main difference between the ‘classic’ hard-boiled writers and the ‘noir-writers’ — although James M. Cain has a foot in each camp — can probably be characterized by two tendencies: a tendency in hardboiled writing to paint a backdrop of institutionalized social corruption; and a tendency in noir-writing to focus on personal psychology, whether it is despair, paranoia or some other psychological crises. These two schools—if we can call these tendencies ‘schools’—are by no means mutually exclusive: hard-boiled writing can display elements of noir, and noir writing can be hard-boiled.

This actually reinforces my feelings about Philip Kerr’s first book in his Berlin Noir trilogy, March Violets: definitely hard-boiled but with noir elements as you might expect in a book set in pre-WWII Nazi Germany.

Here are links to the resources all of whichI consulted and some shamelessly copied from:

• Ardai, Charles–The Dak Heart of Noir.
• Banks, Ray–Noir is for Losers.
• Defective Yeti–The Difference Between Noir and Hardboiled.
• Duggan, Eddie–Writing in the Darkness: The World of Cornell Woolrich. (requires a Google or Facebook login)
• Escribano, Jose Ignacio–A first approach to the difference between hardboiled, noir fiction and crime fiction in Spanish
• Escribano, Jose Ignacio–Notes on Noir Fiction
• Jones, Howard Andrew–Hardboiled or Noir?
• Penzler, Otto–Noir Fiction is About Losers, Not Private Eyes.
• Zeltserman, Davene–One Crime Writer's Thoughts on Noir.