Meaning in Mystery: Why Noir Speaks in a Morally Ambiguous World
The Dark Allure of Heartless Criminals and Hardboiled Detectives
My wife and I have cursed our children. There’s no way they can visit a small English village and not wonder “who done it?” if someone dies while they are there. We watch a lot of crime television. How much? My thirteen-year-old son dressed as Columbo for Halloween this year.
My wife’s mystery tastes run to Arthur Conan Doyle, Rex Stout, and Janet Evanovich. I got my crime-show habit from classic noir, and even though I ended up taking it in literary form, it was the movies that kicked it off.
I remember watching Key Largo at my grandmother’s in Georgia when I was twelve and being mesmerized. Key Largo and The Petrified Forest were my introduction to Humphrey Bogart. Something clicked with me about Bogey. Maybe it was his fedora that reminded me of my hero Indiana Jones, but Casablanca soon followed and made him the man to my awkward teen mind.
Much like a mystery, I followed the clues.
On the Trail
Bogey led me to The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon, written by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, respectively, the two heavy-weight noir writers of the classic era. They defined the genre. If it’s lost on you how big a deal noir was back then, Bogart was a top male box-office star of the forties and fifties. He played both Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, the iconic detectives from the books.
Noir wasn’t the most popular genre of its era, but Notorious and The Postman Always Rings Twice (by James M. Cain, another early noir mover) were among the biggest movies of 1946, the same year The Big Sleep came out. For reference, Disney’s Song of the South was the No. 1 film year, now known as the intellectual property the mouse would like to sweep under the castle rug.
With The Big Sleep, Bogart became my King of Cool.
Dig this scene: Bogart as Marlowe ducks into a bookstore for a stakeout. Said store is operated by bespectacled smoke show Dorothy Malone. Marlowe asks her about rare books, a feat that the clerk in the front across the street posing as antique dealers couldn’t handle. Dorothy knows books and more she pushes Marlowe a bit. A rainstorm rolls up and Marlowe prepares to retreat to his car for the stake out but lightning strikes and Dorothy closes up shop so they can keep a watch for the crooks in private. Marlowe offers her some rye whiskey from his coat flask. She’s got drinking glasses on hand.
When I first saw this, my bookish and funky teen self was jazzed. Here’s Marlowe, charming the girl. And not any girl: This girl knew about books, was wise, and easy on the eyes. The adult in me appreciates that she steals the scene, but even now nearly forty years on she still knocks me for a loop.
My daughter says she looks like my wife. No arguments from me. And funny enough, my wife and I met while we were both working at a library. Libraries and bookstores were cornerstones of my youth. Some of my earliest memories are of following my mom through the stacks. I was probably looking for Dorothy Malone!
Sleuthing the Suspect (with No Internet!)
I don’t remember exactly, but it had to have been late high school or early college when I made the jump from the movies to the books.
If a bookstore opened, we were there. We had B. Daltons in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. McKay’s in Knoxville was an institution. Barnes & Noble opened in Knoxville May 6, 1997. I guarantee we went then or not long after. And whenever we went to Nashville, we would visit Davis Kidd.
These pilgrimages felt mystical. I would cover every section of the store, hunting for names, pieces of the puzzle. Back then, without the internet, this was solving a mystery. You found names. You went to the library, the video store, the bookstore, and you crosschecked. You picked up what matched and built your knowledge base. One publisher in particular made it easy for me to accelerate the pace of my noir consumption.
I didn’t know anything about book publishing at the time and how an imprint could focus on a genre. Black Lizard was founded by Barry Gifford in 1984 and merged with Random House in 1990, creating Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. Looking at my shelves today, I have quite a few. Black Lizard repacked Chandler, Hammett, Cain, Jim Thompson, and more.
Gifford wrote the book Wild at Heart, which I bought and I dug. It was made into a movie starring a snakeskin-jacket-clad Nick Cage with Laura Dern. I’ve schlepped these books around with me for more than thirty years and still poke my nose in them from time to time.
The Clues Come Together
Dr. John Thomas at Roane State Community College in Harriman, Tennessee, was the best money my parents ever spent on my education. He taught me to think and how to read. I don’t mean my ABC’s; I mean how to glean info.
I went to Roane State with a scholarship in painting in 1993. At this point I knew what a curious teen in a small town with a library and video store card knew about music, film, and literature. Like I said before, this was before the internet, so if you were into something that wasn’t on TV or on the cover of USA Today, then you really didn’t have much frame of reference for what it meant.
I stalked Dr. T’s office hours and he, God bless him, always welcomed me. He was my dad’s age, maybe a little younger, never went to Nam because he was in school, and was a total lefty in the best pre-internet sense. He looked like Father Guido Sarducci, smoking cigarettes with his Gandhi glasses, a sports coat and collarless shirts, topped off with an old-time baseball cap.
He introduced me to The Thin Man movies, with Nick and Nora Charles based on Hammett’s The Thin Man. He put me onto the Dick Powell movie Farewell, My Lovely, probably the best Chandler adaptation of that era. We got into all film generally—silent era to the modern. We’d go outside in all weather so he could smoke and we could talk books, movies, art, and bands. I can remember reading Hammett’s The Continental Op (published by Black Lizard) in the Roane State gym, waiting on a friend to get out of class.
Noir was post-Great War, the Progressive Era, the Cold War in smoke and neon. Dr. T was the liner notes. He pushed me off to UT Knoxville, but we stayed in touch a few years until I moved to New York.
Noir was everywhere in the late 1990s. L.A. Confidential hit theaters in 1997 and that led me to James Ellroy, the ultimate King of Crime Novels. In ’97 I was wearing my black pinstripe pants, ’50s shirts three sizes too big, and reading plenty of Ellroy. I was in class at UTK on the Hill. It must have been science or math, and I had his book My Dark Places in my lap, reading and turning pages like the book was a knife through my hand, while the professor droned on to the packed-auditorium survey class. One day I’d briefly meet Ellroy, and that’s a story in itself.
However, L.A. Confidential is not the noir movie essential to the era. I was still at Roane State in 1994 when Quinten Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction came out. A friend and I skipped class to go see it. We navigated this without a smartphone. We had to look up the time in the paper. It’s thirty-three minutes from Roane State in Harriman to The Grove in Oak Ridge. When Pulp Fiction starts the screen displays two definitions of pulp. The first is, “a soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter,” and the second? “A magazine or book containing lurid subject matter and being characteristically printed on rough, unfinished paper.”
If it hadn’t clicked by then, noir was burned on my brain.
Noir Compare, Noir Contrast
At its worst noir—or mystery more broadly—can get fatuous. Perhaps it’s a hairdresser who solves murders by night, or it’s about crimes solved by ladies-knitting societies.
It’s often said that noir is similar to sci-fi. Continuing our film comparisons, Blade Runner has noir bones. Blade Runner is an all-time fav movie to me. It makes sense that I like sci-fi and don’t like fantasy. Hobbits are fine, but I don’t need to see men’s feet; please: oxfords, brogues, boots, or espadrilles at least.
Literary fiction is often too open for me. People will write about anything if you let them! A girl I dated in college suggested I read Geek Love about a family crossbreeding their children for a circus freak show. It still sounds silly and gross to me. I’m a fan of parameters, and mysteries give you automatic parameters. Crime happens. Go dig. Mysteries and noirs move like a train; they have a destination.
The school of writers for the genre took a little Poe, some Conan Doyle, and Hemingway, but I think there’s a modern twist. Consider this: Chandler and Hammett both possibly learned to write at work. Chandler was an oil man, though not for very long, and Hammett was a Pinkerton, though beset by illness. Perhaps this grounds their art in ways that speak to me. In his book The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett, Nathan Ward speculates about Hammett’s becoming a writer “so late, seemingly without the customary years of practice and ambition.” As Anne Diebel summarizes in The Paris Review,
He suggests that composing “scores of operative reports” for Pinkerton taught Hammett “to write pithily and with appreciation for the language of street characters,” and having his “reports edited or rewritten by supervisors” provided “a kind of literary training.”
Diebel dismisses Wards’s theory as too simple, but I like the idea. She lands on Hammett’s voracious reading as the key; I tend to agree with this too.
Noir colors the fabric of all crime or mystery literature. When someone says a mystery thriller feels “authentic,” they mean the noir elements. The language is tough. The descriptions aren’t flowery. They aren’t paid by the word like Dickens.
Noir and mysteries are endlessly adaptable! Though I decried it just a few paragraphs ago, I now say, Bring on the mysteries solved by the retired librarians of Spokane! There are beach-read mysteries, bail-bond mysteries, Elmore Leonard and his wise guy yucks! There’s a Thai series set in Bangkok by John Burdett. There’s Nordic noir from Nesbo to Mankell and Larson. There’s a Native American detective series by Tony Hillerman. Halfway around the world there is Japanese noir by writers like Kōtarō Isaka—most notable for Maria Beetle, published in English as Bullet Train, the book on which the Brad Pitt movie is based.
Why Noir Still Speaks
Noir was like a stand-in religion for me in my mid-twenties. My faith hadn’t reached the point where I realized I had to go to church and read the Bible, but quasi-conservative poses in the guise of noir was how I steered my ship. Spoiler alert: Noir was not a good strategy, for anything. But the postmodern world, the nineties for me, seemed to give up and gaze at its navel and try to “find itself” in an amoral morass.
The noir detective was the last man standing with romantic notions and a concept of right and wrong, albeit with a whiskey flask. On the whole that seemed massively cooler to me.
Robert Parker, award-winning mystery writer who finished Chandler’s last manuscript for Poodle Springs, wrote that with Marlowe
Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious—an innocent who knows better, a Romantic who is tough enough to sustain Romanticism in a world that has seen the eternal footman hold its coat and snicker. Living at the end of the Far West, where the American dream ran out of room, no hero has ever been more congruent with his landscape. Chandler had the right hero in the right place, and engaged him in the consideration of good and evil at precisely the time when our central certainty of good no longer held.
It’s no secret that murder and mystery are core to human existence. But our days are filled with lesser mysteries that despite their relative weight fill our lives with dread and loss. Did the girl love the boy? Why did she leave? Did the father love the son? What did he do wrong?
These are the questions that fill every aching heart. The mystery genre is the ongoing tale that seeks line by line to bring order to chaos, fixing these breaks in a visceral and tactile way. Of course, in the best noir or mystery it’s not always easy or clearcut. But as Lyle Lovett once sang in “Here I Am”:
But what would you be if you didn’t even try
You have to try
Recommended Reading
Here are five examples for those who want to give noir a try.
Ross Macdonald. The history books tell you Hammett kicks it off in the twenties and thirties, Chandler picks up the torch for the forties and fifties, and by the eighties James Ellroy takes the mantle. Ross Macdonald is the bridge through the fifties and sixties with depth and poetry. Macdonald’s writing is exquisite, and The Zebra-Striped Hearse is firing on all cylinders.
Henning Mankell. Scandinavian noir is an interesting phenomenon. As you would expect, it’s cold, bleak, and dark. I’ve read Nesbo and Larson, but Mankell was the king. Faceless Killers is one of the best books I’ve ever read about human evil and the fear of “the other.” I fashioned part of my own novel Old Timer’s Blues, a crime noir set in Nashville, after the opening section of Faceless Killers.
Lawrence Osborne. I’m always going to suggest you read Lawrence Osborne; to my taste he’s the greatest living writer. My favorite might be Ellroy. But Osborne is crushing it, as the kids say. Only To Sleep is the result of Osborne being approached by the Chandler Estate to write a new Marlowe case. It’s a win all around. (Of course, I’d be remiss to not say that Chandler’s The Big Sleep is worth the first paragraph alone.)
James Ellroy. He has plenty of great classic noir books. His bestselling is probably The Black Dahlia about the infamous . . . murder seems too kind a word . . . of Elizabeth Short. But his most recent book, Widespread Panic, is a hootenanny. The book shakes like an earthquake and ticks like the bomb squad is coming. I could not put it down.
Chester Himes. A Rage in Harlem—what a title! Grave Digger Jones and Ed Coffin are the Crocket and Tubbs here. Ellroy wrote the introduction to a recent reissue and says, “A Rage in Harlem features a mind-mauling array of chump-change hustles, lurid larcenies, and malicious mischief.” That is an understatement. It’s a bang bang bang ride.
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I love the Thin Man films. They are a hilarious send-up of the noir genre, answering the question, "What if the stock hardboiled detective was happily married?"
I read both Hammet and Chandler last year. The bleak cynicism seemed a bit exaggerated, but they certainly are genre defining. As for the films, Humphrey Bogart was to hardboiled private eye what Errol Flynn was to swashbuckling hero.
I have a Lego Film noir detective minifigure. It is black and white, complete with fedora, turned up collar, and magnifying glass. The other hand holds a red fish, i.e. a red herring. Makes me laugh everytime I look at it.
I just read my first Hammett: The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest. The Thin Man is up next. I was intrigued by how his detectives are a bit morally indeterminate - they rarely kill someone, but they're not always honest or loyal. Not the profile I was expecting. I need to watch at least one movie now, you've convinced me!