Al,
Re your comment below:
> What intrigued me about this was that, although
I
> read both types, I
> immediately realised I had a preference towards
the
> "crime" category, and
> that these were almost all what I thought of
as
> "noir". The "anti-crime"
> category, on the other hand, was almost all what
I
> considered hardboiled.
> I'd always suspected a preference for something
that
> I loosely defined as
> noir without being able to be precise as to
what
> that meant. "Dark and
> sinister" didn't work. For example, Stark's
Parker
> novels, which I like a
> lot, aren't "dark and sinister" (to my mind
they're
> "tough and colloquial").
> But they fit in the "crime" category. So, for
me,
> whether a book is
> hardboiled or noir tells me less than if
it's
> "crime" or "anti-crime".
The reason your analysis doesn't really work (and don't get
me wrong here; it may work for you, but it's not how "noir"
is commonly used), is that there are many books/stories/films
accurately, or at least commonly, described as noir, that are
also anti-crime.
For example, Cornell Woolrich, who is to "noir" what Hammett
is to "hard-boiled," McBain is to "police procedural," and
Christie is to "cozy," writes what you refer to as
"anti-crime" far more often than he writes "crime." That is,
there is a criminal, opposed by the hero who emerges
triumphant when he (and, in Woolrich, very often "she")
vanquishes the criminal. Now, in a Woolrich story, this
triumph is more often likely to come about through chance,
caprice, and the vicissitudes of fate, than it is from the
hero's resourcefulness, but, however it happens, the hero
wins when he solves the crime. Very often, in fact,
Woolrich's hero is a cop (though there's no attempt at the
"technical verity" that distinguishes the police
procedural).
What makes Woolrich noir isn't the story mechanics, or the
criminality or non-criminality of the main character. It's
the atmosphere, which is always dark, sinister, and
foreboding.
To use my favorite examples from film (since "film noir" is
how the term came to be applied to prose fiction in this
country), MURDER, MY SWEET is the quintessential film noir.
It's also a hard-boiled private eye story. MARLOWE, which
features the same lead character, isn't noir at all. That's
not a knock. MARLOWE is a very enjoyable film, but the visual
approach the director (Paul Bogart) takes isn't anything like
the dark, sinister visuals that makes Edward Dmytryk's
version of Chandler so memorable.
JIM DOHERTY
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