So, after pages and pages of dissertation about the merit of the words Noir or HB to define a certain type of mystery fiction novels that appeared around the 20's in the USA and survived until 1997 all over the world, after having evolved to a broader base of subjects, types of writing, and characters... we still do not know what most of you all are really speaking about! In order of appearance in the thread: A. -most of the time references for 'proof' are given ONLY for novels of the 30's and 40's with a timid extension to the 50's . Chandler and Hammett, being apparently the only sources to take into consideration to judge if a definition is working and well fit... -cinema now seems to receive the same treatment: only films of the end 30's, 40's and early 50's are considered for examination Are you not all here confusing the analyse of a genre with the research about its historical foundation? What about the HB/Noir that was produced after this time period? Your system is excluding it...? With the same method and approach applied to literary novels, all the novels of the modern literature should be judged only by the criteria found in the origin of the modern novel as a literary genre ( origins currently admitted: 1605- Don Quixotte/Spanish - mid17th century for French literature: La Princesse de Cleves- English literature: end 18th century,early 19th- you name yourself the elected... ) to see if they deserve to be named 'novel'. Maybe could we apply something more evolutive... B. -Excess of rules and definitions in a system leads to paradox... (Daily observation in the messages dealing with the Hb/Noir definition) Well, yes it is a fact. Should you have asked your colleagues of the mathematics department about it they could have explained it very quickly . A clue: axioms are the culprits. So be prepared not to cover the whole domain even with a top definition! Paradoxes are difficult to accept, but unavoidable. Then: what about the artistic freedom? Artists are here to break the rules and evolve. You will have to allow this to the Hb/Noir writer...or cineast. But they did'nt wait for you: they already did it... In the 50's and later... Why not to prefer a set of characteristics that will describe most of the domain, to a strict definition that will be more a double edge knife than a working tool? Strict definition being unavoidably subject to endless arguments leading to nowhere. Popular arts have often lousy words to name them: what is Sci-Fi? Worse: in English there is no good word describing these strips of drawings telling a story- comic (s) is finally the best we can find .' Graphic novel' is pathetic, and is unable to cover all of the genres of ...comics. As academics always enter ' popular' genres or their critic late ( when it is less dangerous to emit opinions as some 'masters' of the genre were already elected by others) the vocabulary stays a little loose, coming more from a habit than from an analyse. Same apply for popular fiction and HB. We have to accept it. It is not the result of a plot. C -Horror! Genres can overlap... and they do! HB can be Noir, and vice versa... Well yes... Even if it is a nightmare for publishers/producers that like very much simple categories, writers and cineasts are arrogant enough to overlap genres in one work. Well, well well... what a world! To avoid endless arguments I will illustrate this by examples taken from American films: - a lot of 'westerns' from mid- sixties onwards are really hard-boiled (some earlier examples can be found as well). In fact they are more from the Hard-Boiled genre due the plot and the type of characters. They are in HB developed in a western setting... Best examples: 'The Wild Bunch' 'ride the High Country' both by Peckinpah. Western with obvious Noir coloration: 'Johnny Guitar' -'Blade Runner' is more HB with a tint of Noir than SF in the cinema treatment it received! But IMO the novel by Philip K Dick is SF, speculative and poetic SF, but definitely SF... NOT HB! Same kind of overlap will be found in mystery literature. Fortunately. D - by two times, the word Noir was rejected only because of its French origin... Then you should call them (films and novels): Gothic - authentified Anglo-Saxon label . If you do not see why, go back to your books (sorry:texts) But then you will encounter another pitfall: the German origin of that kind of literature.... Gosh, foreigners... again! There is a big problem with novels in the English literature; real literary genre appeared so late that it is maybe normal to admit that other cultures had a better vocabulary to differentiate genres of novels, to establish nuances and patterns, as they had already a tradition for analyzing, and a wider experience to review, novels of the literary genre long before the English culture. Somebody said that Noir was more an impressionist definition: absolutely true, as the word was chosen in French to * evoke* multiple analogies between different medias, in their forms and in their inspirations, and the word Noir was itself making an analogy with its former uses to qualify fate( bad luck) and also pessimism in some arts (humour noir, roman noir -long before HB/Noir appeared). Americana: recently, an American writer publishing mystery novels of quality with some success and applause from the critics declared " In America today the kiss of death the critics can give to an author is to qualify his work as: literary or Noir..." well, well well... Short conclusion for a too long text: Let us try to make a set of characteristics typical of the genres we want to analyze giving an overview of what HB/Noir is, avoiding strict definitions. We will certainly discover they overlap. But we have to account for the whole history of the genres, not only for their early forms, if we want something appropriated. E.Borgers - # RARA-AVIS: To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" # to majordomo@icomm.ca