from the New York Times
<<CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
The New Noir, Not Always by Men or by Americans
By MARGO JEFFERSON Published: February 4, 2005
Noir is the perfect example of how a popular form goes
classic. Video stores devote shelves to noir films. Theaters
mount sold-out festivals; we crowd in and cheer at the first
sight of those terse, lurid titles on-screen: "Double
Indemnity," "Naked City," "I Wake Up Screaming." Playwrights,
poets and performers create noir characters and scenes. We
read novelists like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Jim
Thompson - once deemed pulp - in respectable Library of
America volumes.
The best television drama still thrives on noir
traditions: cities that are corrupt from top to bottom, law
officers as cynical as the criminals they pursue, people
driven by greed (for money, power, sex), and a pervasive
sense that everyone has hidden motives and nothing is what it
seems. "Law & Order," with its clockwork plots of social
and psychic blight that end bleakly or ambiguously, has
entered rerun eternity. The tales of multilayered corruption
and complication in "The Wire" make repeat viewing both
necessary and pleasurable.
(George Pelacanos, one of the best contemporary noir
novelists, writes for "The Wire." So does flashy Dennis
Lehane, whose pre-"Mystic River" thrillers were his
best.)
In the 1980's, the small, resourceful Black Lizard
Press began reissuing noir novels of the 40's and 50's in all
their pulp glory: small volumes on thin paper with steamy,
stylized covers that seemed to say: "I'm a piece of lowlife
memorabilia. Don't pass me by."
In 1990 Vintage bought Black Lizard; its first reissues
were upscale and sleek. Now, Vintage has reissued a much
bigger selection of these books in their original formats,
both famous and obscure. You may know titles like "Shoot the
Piano Player," but what about "The Damned Don't Die"?
It seems noir is busting out all over. But why now? Ann
Douglas, professor of literature at Columbia University, is
writing a book about the form called
"Noir Nation." As a genre, noir took off in the late 40's,
she said, adding,"Its golden age coincided with the first 10
years of the cold war and of the U.S. as an openly imperial
power." Its resurgence is hardly accidental now, she said,
when conservatives talk about a new kind of war between good
and evil and reclaim America's right to be an empire.
"Noir is a critique of power," Ms. Douglas went on. "It
operates on Balzac's premise that every great fortune is the
result of a great crime. Power and money are ugly and they
rule. You enjoy it but you don't forget it." At the very
least, noir offers an alternate reality - moments of real
passion, a bleak code of honor, and a need for freedom amid
corruption. At its best, noir offers a map of
subversion.
Noir was a brainchild of the United States. And most of
the creators of classic noir - novelists and screenwriters,
directors and cameramen - were men. Women were their
mysterious, sometimes villainous, always seductive objects of
desire. It should be no surprise, then, that in the 1970's
female writers started creating female detectives with the
cynical integrity of the classic men.
(One of the first of these writers, Marcia Muller, remains
one of the best.)
Right now, though, some of the best writers of modern
noir come from outside the United States - Sweden's Henning
Mankell, for instance, whose Kurt Wallander mysteries move
from local and national politics to global economics
and
(in Ms. Douglas's phrase) "transnational psychopathy."
Some of the most original writers of this imported noir
are women. Noir has always shown that greed and chaos are as
close as the company we work for or the politicians we vote
for. The best female writers are adding families to that list
- with a vengeance. And if male writers have explored the
eros of violence, these women explore the violence of
eros.
I found a telling remark that seemed to foreshadow this
trend in "Detour," one of the few classic noir tales by a
woman. In this clever 1953 novel by Helen Nielsen, a burly,
thickheaded law officer sneers, "This is a sheriff's office,
not a court of human relations." But noir is a court of human
relations, and some crimes are beyond legal restitution. In
the Scottish writer Denise Mina's forceful trilogy
("Garnethill," "Exile,"
"Resolution"), Maureen, the central character, is an
alcoholic; a working-class underachiever in Glasgow, fighting
the legacy of a sexually brutal family. Glasgow is also the
city of noir brutality in Louise Welsh's sinister
"Cutting Room." As a drug dealer observes, "You know, Glasgow
imports more baseball bats than any city in Britain, and
there's not a single baseball team in town." The narrator is
a witty, dissolute gay man of 43 named Rilke, who works in an
auction house. While assessing the estate of a rich Glasgow
merchant, Rilke comes across pornographic photographs that
suggest a young woman has been killed in the making of a
snuff film. Unsure of his own motives, he decides to find
out.
Ms. Welsh is such a good writer she can afford
leisurely scenes that give us the texture of Rilke's life but
don't help solve the mystery. Why should they? This isn't how
life works. It is Ms. Welsh's elegantly edited version of how
a noir unfolds in real time.
Two of the best female new-noir novelists I have read
are Japanese: Miyuki Miyabe and Natsuo Kirino give us an
underworld that has moved quietly above ground. In this
quotidian world no one is heroic: not the criminals and not
their pursuers. Men and women get equal time as objects of
desire and menace.
Both writers take the full measure of Japan's boom-bust
economy of the 1980's. In Ms. Miyabe's coolly harrowing "All
She Was Worth," money is the engine of lust: mergers and
scams have turned consumers into addicts. Everyone borrows,
some steal and a few kill. Her new novel, "Shadow Family,"
will be published this month: it involves a husband and
father who creates a second, altogether different family on
the Internet.
Ms. Kirino's "Out" has just been published in paperback
by Vintage, and it is superb. It begins on a factory line
where women assemble box lunches. Four are part-time night
shift workers; by day they are hardworking, unhappy
homemakers. When one kills her husband in a fit or rage, the
others band together to hide the crime.
Sisterhood? More like the desperate need for money, and
for the ringleader, Masako, a desperate need to break free of
her life. Masako is a fascinating character: stern,
relentlessly smart; a crime-solver and a criminal. Ms. Kirino
writes of Masako's growing solitude: "When stones lying warm
in the sun were turned over, they exposed the cold damp earth
underneath, and that was where Masako had burrowed deep.
There was no trace of warmth in this dark earth, yet for a
bug curled up tight in it, it was a peaceful and familiar
world."
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 04 Feb 2005 EST