Introduction

Notes Introduction 1. Martin Rowson, The Waste Land (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1990), jacket copy. 2. Raymond Chandler, ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, Atlantic Monthly, Decem- ber 1944, quoted by Tom Hiney, Raymond Chandler: a Biography (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 101. 3. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (eds), Modernism 1890–1930 (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1976, 1985), p. 26; Scott R. Christian- son, ‘A Heap of Broken Images . .’, in Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazer (eds), The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contempo- rary Literary Theory (Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1990), pp. 141–7, considers affinities between hard-boiled detective novels and Eliot’s Waste Land, emphasising setting, narrative fragmentation, the representa- tion of the meaninglessness of modern life and the subjective, oppositional nature of hard-boiled popular modernism. 4. Ginette Vincendeau, ‘Noir is Also a French Word’, in Ian Cameron (ed.), The Movie Book of Film Noir (London: Studio Vista, 1992), p. 52, quoting Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, Panorama du Film Noir Américain (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1955). 5. James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts (Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press, 1998), pp. 38 and 48. 6. Malcolm Bradbury and Howard Temperley, Introduction to American Studies (London: Longman, 1981, 1998), p. 46. See also Jon Tuska, Dark Cinema: American Film Noir in Cultural Perspective (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984), p. 152. Tuska argues that noir is in effect an anti-generic movement, that is, implicitly a critique of the escapist fare offered by more traditional Hollywood genres. This contrast between more traditional genres and noir is neatly captured in the two Muse figures at the end of the Coen brothers’ 1991 film, Barton Fink – the picture-postcard girl of romance on the one hand and, on the other, the severed head of Audrey, noir victim and inspiration. 7. Christine Gledhill, ‘Klute 1: a Contemporary Film Noir and Feminist Criti- cism’, in E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir (London: British Film Insti- tute, 1972), p. 14. 8. Bradbury and McFarlane, pp. 41 and 47. 9. Michael Shelden, Graham Greene: the Man Within (London: Heinemann, 1994), p. 99; Naremore, pp. 48 and 53; Lillian Hellman, ‘Introduction’ to Hammett’s The Big Knockover and Other Stories (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1969), p. 9. 10. Naremore, p. 43. 11. Even though critics like Silver and Ward take account of European influ- ences, they have remained committed to a view of film noir as essentially 272 Notes 273 American in character – ‘the unique example of a wholly American film style’. Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward (eds), Film Noir: an Encyclopedic Ref- erence to the American Style (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1992), p. 1. Others, like Robin Buss, in French Film Noir (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1994), have more strongly stressed the influence of, for example, European directors working in America after the war, German Expression- ism and the Gothic. 12. Naremore, p. 237. 13. Reprinted in R. Barton Palmer (ed.), Perspectives on Film Noir (New York: G. K. Hall and Co., 1996) and in Alain Silver and James Ursini (eds), Film Noir Reader (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996, 1999). 14. Revised and expanded third edition. The Silver and Ward Encyclopedic Ref- erence, which was first published in 1979, is one of the essential film noir reference books. 15. Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton, ‘Towards a Definition of Film Noir’ (1955), and Todd Erickson, ‘Kill Me Again: Movement becomes Genre’ (1990), in Silver and Ursini, pp. 17–26 and 307–30; Naremore, pp. 220 and 38. 16. Naremore, pp. 276–7 and 10. 17. There have, in addition, been another 400-plus noir-influenced films dis- tributed directly into home video, cable and so on. Erickson, in Silver and Ursini, pp. 307 and 323–4. ‘Tech Noir’ is the name of the nightclub in The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984); ‘Digital Noir’ is a website that concen- trates on cyber noir. 18. J. P. Telotte, Voices in the Dark: the Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 5. 19. That is, a definition appropriate to literary noir must go beyond things like low-key lighting, chiaroscuro effects, deep focus photography, extreme camera angles and expressionist distortion. 20. Julian Symons, Bloody Murder, From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: a History (London: Pan, 1972, 1992), pp. 201–3. 21. Martin Rubin, Thrillers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 5–7 and 17–32. As Rubin observes, the label ‘thriller’ has been con- tentious, and in formulating his own definition he rightly jettisons, for example, the widely applied definition offered by Jerry Palmer in Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), viz., that a thriller requires just two ingredients, a hero and a conspiracy – which is, as Rubin argues, both too wide (including, for example, the classic detective story) and too narrow (excluding many texts and films that would generally be counted as ‘classic thrillers’, such as Greene’s Confidential Agent, Highsmith’s Ripley novels and Hitchcock’s Psycho). 22. Silver and Ward, p. 3. 23. Fritz Lang, quoted in Peter Bogdanovich, Fritz Lang in America (New York: Praeger, 1967), pp. 86–7. 24. Examples of Thompson narratives that function in this way are discussed at the end of Chapter 4. Telotte, p. 35, and see Gledhill, ‘Klute 1’, in Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir on ways in which conflicting interpretations can be brought to the fore in film noir. 274 Notes 25. James Sallis, Difficult Lives: Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Chester Himes (New York: Gryphon Books, 1993), p. 5. 26. The similarities to Hammett have been noted by Jon Thompson, ‘Dashiell Hammett’s Hard-Boiled Modernism’, in Christopher Metress (ed.), The Criti- cal Response to Dashiell Hammett (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), p. 119: ‘the principle of equivalence between the underworld and the bour- geois society proper that produces an essentially anarchistic vision of society in The Secret Agent finds resonances in the violent, mayhem-filled cities described in Hammett’s fiction...’. 27. Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screen- writing (London: Methuen, 1999), p. 82. 28. Noir is also distinguished from certain kinds of hard-boiled fiction by the fact that the ‘tough guy’ investigator, heir to the action adventure hero, can, like the Holmesian detective, emerge as a scourge of wrongdoing, defeating a villain by decisive physical action as the detective defeats him by effec- tive intellectual endeavour. 29. Erickson, in Silver and Ursini, p. 319, quoting Eugenio Zaretti, art director of Slam Dance. 30. Erickson, in Silver and Ursini, p. 308; Naremore, p. 10. 31. Tuska, pp. 150–1, suggests that a film which is ‘noir’ only at times but not in its resolution is perhaps better classified as a ‘film gris’ or melodrama, rather than as ‘a truly black film’. Comedy can also, if it becomes dominant, make a film or text ‘less noir’: a noir atmosphere can combine with black humour but is deflated by certain kinds of comedy. Silver and Ward, p. 331, discuss the difference between films noirs that contain elements of comic relief (a common ingredient) and films in which the ‘tonal divergence’ is greater, producing, say, a comedy thriller. In films of the nineties, the point can be illustrated with reference to the tendency towards broad comedy to be found in such noir-related films as the Lethal Weapon series (Richard Donner, 1987–98), which goes too far in the direction of emphasising the humorous aspects of the relationships to be truly noir, in contrast, for example, to a darker version of the buddy-cop film like Colors (Dennis Hopper, 1988). See Erickson, in Silver and Ursini, p. 324. 32. Telotte, pp. 4–5. 33. Alfred Appel, Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, quoted by Robert Porfirio, ‘No Way Out: Existential Motifs in the Film Noir’, in Palmer (ed.), Perspectives, p. 117. Part I: 1920–45 1. Introduction to Fingerman ([1950], London: Ace, 1960), p. 6. 2. Fingerman, p. 5. 3. David Madden (ed.), Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties (Carbondale, Ill., 1968), pp. xxv–xxvi. 4. George Orwell, ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, in Collected Essays (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961, 1975), pp. 249–63. 5. John Houseman, ‘Today’s Hero: a Review’, Hollywood Quarterly, 2, No. 2 (1947), p. 163, and John Houseman, Vogue, 15 January 1947, quoted by Notes 275 Richard Maltby, ‘The Politics of the Maladjusted Text’, in Ian Cameron (ed.), The Movie Book of Film Noir (London: Studio Vista, 1992), p. 41. 6. Joseph T. Shaw, quoted by Bill Pronzini and Jack Adrian (eds), Hard-Boiled: an Anthology of American Crime Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 9. 7. Herbert Ruhm (ed.), The Hard-Boiled Detective: Stories from ‘Black Mask’ Maga- zine, 1920–1951 (New York: Random House, 1977), p. xiv. 8. Rick A. Eden, ‘Detective Fiction as Satire’, Genre, 16 (Fall 1983), pp. 279–95, argues that the hard-boiled detective is akin to the Juvenalian satirist, in contrast to the Horatian tone of formal detective fiction. 9. George Orwell, ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’ (1941), in Collected Essays, p. 161. For a fuller discussion of these pre-World War Two English dilem- mas, see Lee Horsley, Fictions of Power in English Literature: 1900–1950 (London: Longman, 1995), pp. 155–61. 1 Hard-boiled Investigators 1. For example, in the Introduction to Bill Pronzini and Jack Adrian (eds), Hard-Boiled: an Anthology of American Crime Stories (Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1995), p. 6, and in Geoffrey O’Brien, Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997).

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