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Earlier this week, the science fiction blog io9 revisited Domenic Stansberry‘s “Noir Manifesto”–an essay arguing that many contemporary novelists have lost site of the original spirit of noir fiction.
Here’s an excerpt from the manifesto: “[T]he darker world of noir has been displaced in the marketplace by a different kind of crime novel: the commercial thriller (more likely on its jacket puffery to announce itself a literary thriller, though in truth that genre all but expired with Graham Greene). And these thrillers, no matter the surface similarities to noir fiction, have aesthetic and political intentions quite the opposite of [Jean-Patrick] Manchette and those writers he admired.”
GalleyCat reader Brian Lindenmuth (the nonfiction editor at Spinetingler Magazine) wrote a passionate and link-filled response to the manifesto. We’ve reprinted his short essay below. What do you think?
“Noir Manifesto Revisited” by Brian Lindenmuth
Noir as a genre or sub-genre is and has always will be misunderstood and misapplied as a label — even by those who like it. Two of the best workings on the subject that I’ve seen are Tom Piccirilli’s essay “Dead Mower Dreams and the Weeds of Boo Radley” and David Corbet’s essay, “Insulting Your Intelligence (‘Just gimme some noiriness’)”— both from the Mulholland site.
The trend in noir definition discussions for the last few years has been to go the reductive route; to try and distill its essence down to one or two pat and pithy lines. We’ve come up with some great ones, but it’s a far more complex concept ultimately that needs some room to breathe. Both essays remind us that there is no easy answer.
What happens a lot of times is a conflation of terms and/or subgenres. In this case, as is most typical, the noir tradition is being mixed up with the hardboiled detective tradition.
Last year, Otto Penzler and James Ellroy edited The Best American Noir of the Century anthology. In promotion of the anthology, Penzler wrote a few guest pieces for different sites. “Noir Fiction Is About Losers, Not Private Eyes” appeared on The Huffington Post, directly confronting confusion between the detective novel and the noir novel.
Here is a quote:
Not only are these two sub-categories of crime fiction not the same, they are philosophically diametrically opposed to each other … Happy endings are not required in a private eye story, but the reader will generally have a sense of justice being done as the lone hero overcomes all the forces that have been arrayed against him. This is a uniquely American sensibility, deriving from the lone, stalwart sheriff cleaning up a town. The noir story with a happy ending has never been written, nor can it be. The lost and corrupt souls who populate these tales were doomed before we met them because of their hollow hearts and depraved sensibilities.
Penzler is largely right in talking about this conflation of terms and one’s own misunderstandings.
Stansberry is guilty of conflation as well, but in a broader sense. He slips and slides all over the place, but seems to be saying that noir died with Manchette. Now I love me some Manchette, but he wasn’t the last noir practitioner.
In fact, one of the most basic conflations of the genre is that folks believe the crime novel is the same as the mystery novel. They aren’t the same. One’s purpose is to solve the mystery and restore some semblance of order and the others isn’t. Often times when someone thinks they are talking about one genre, they are really talking about the other genre. Imagine if I started off talking about far future novels and then midway through morphed into steampunk and then finished with the space opera.
With that said, I do agree with much of what Stansberry is saying. The bottom line is that noir — the true black novel — isn’t for everyone. If you believe that “noir” novels are toothless, then you aren’t reading the right books.
Noir hasn’t gone away, but it isn’t a popular form of fiction. It requires some diligence to track down. Here are some examples of noir/dark crime novels that HAVE done it right:
Bloody Women by Helen Fitzgerald
The Devil’s Staircase by Helen Fitzgerald
Late Rain by Lynn Kostoff
The Long Fall by Lynn Kostoff
A Choice of Nightmares by Lynn Kostoff
Pike by Benjamin Whitmer
Savages by Don Winslow
Firework by Eugene Marten
Waste by Eugene Marten
Lethal Injection by Jim Nisbet
Killer by Dave Zeltserman
Sleepless by Charlie Huston
Four Corners of Night by Craig Holden
Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell
Tomato Red by Daniel Woodrell
The Death of Sweet Mister by Daniel Woodrell
The Last Deep Breath by Tom Piccirilli
I-5 by Summer Brenner
Senseless by Stona Fitch
Slammer by Alan Guthrie
Hard Man by Alan Guthrie
Savage Night by Allan Guthrie
Saturday’s Child by Ray Banks
Last Days by Brian Evenson
The Open Curtain by Brian Evenson
Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand
Cast of Shadows by Kevin Guilfoile
Gone Baby Gone by Dennis Lehane (which subverts the very notion of
order being restored at the end)
God is a Bullet by Boston Teran
The God File by Frank Turner Hollon
Drive by James Sallis
No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
American Skin by Ken Bruen
I would also argue the idea put forth here that “noir” (or even by conflated extension “hardboiled”) is “the fundamental inspiration for a ton of urban fantasy right now.” First you have to take a look at the genre then the influences.
Urban fantasy existed as a sub-genre long before it became a force of marketing nature. Others have argued that urban fantasy that is popular now is an entirely different beast then the urban fantasy written before–while the books share a genre name, their roots and intentions are different.
It isn’t easy to classify Urban Fantasy as a genre because folks are often talking about different things. This blogger’s opinion is instructive. For more on this development of a modern “genre” check out these two links for a start: “Timeline of a Trend” and “Urban Fantasy, From Whence Came You? And Where Are You Going with That Trope?!”
Now let’s briefly talk influences. Whatever the reductive DNA of a noir or hardboiled novel is (losers crushed by larger forces for the former; tough, moral, colloquial, and terse sentence style for the latter) these certainly are not primary influences of the new urban fantasy. Of the old, pre-existing urban fantasy perhaps, but not the new. What are the primary influences for the genre? It doesn’t matter for this discussion, because the only thing that needs to be established is that noir isn’t the primary influence.
I think that the common thread that binds Urban Fantasy and Noir isn’t this idea of influence, but instead, the idea that they are both misunderstood and misapplied terms used enthusiastically by both proponents and opponents. They often form a big tent for both different types of stories and personal interpretations of meaning.
Either way, you should check out what the new crop of noir authors are doing.