Vince,
Re your refences below:
> In her book The Noir Thriller, Lee Horsley makes
a
> good case for hardboiled
> being a subset of noir.
>
> More info:
>
>
http://www.crimeculture.com/Contents/Hard-Boiled.html
>
>
http://www.crimeculture.com/Contents/Noir%20Thriller%20Intro.html
>
> http://www.crimeculture.com/
Interesting, but it makes the common mistake of most academic
studies (one might argue ALL academic studies) of literature,
which is the presuppostion that nothing is so simple that it
can't be made more complicated.
Some things really are simple. "Hard-boiled" and
"noir" are two of them.
To focus on one fallacious argument made in one of the
pieces, Horsely draws a distinction between HB detectives who
maintain an air of moral superiority
(i.e. Marlowe), and those who are, in some way, implicated in
the corruption (i.e. Spade and the Op), character he calls
"compromise detectives."
"Compromise detective," he says, are transitional figures in
the evolution to "noir."
Among the many rocks against which this distinction sinks is
the fact that, as was pointed out several weeks ago, Marlowe
also has to make moral compromises to achieve any success
(for all that he tries his best to compromise as little as
possible), and the fact that detective characters whom no one
could ever label hard-boiled, like Conan Doyle's Sherlock
Holmes in
"The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton" and "The Blue
Carbuncle," Christie's Hercule Poirot in MURDER ON THE ORIENT
EXPRESS, and Van Dine's Philo Vance in at least one of those
unreadable "(six-letter word) MURDER CASE books, all make the
same kind of moral compromises WITHOUT being transitional
figures.
"Noir's" atmosphere. That's all it is. All that other stuff,
the pessimism, the nihilism, the fatalism, and the defeatism,
might be important movements within crime fiction but they're
not the sum total of "noir." There's too many other things
that ARE "noir," but aren't that, for that to be what defines
noir. But what it all has in common is a dark and sinister
atmosphere, so it follows that the atmospheric elements are
also the defining elements.
JIM DOHERTY
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