Kerry and Miker,
Re your comments below:
Miker:
> >I have been toying with the idea that without
a
> >contrived definition restricting noir to the
30s
> and
> >beyond, the term is so generic as to be
worthless.
>
> >This is my problem with the famous
Doherty
> definition
> >as "dark and sinister." It simply lets too
many
> cats
> >in the door.
Kerry:
> Such as all those dark & sinister yarns in
which
> good reassuringly triumphs
> over evil at the end. But I'm not sure it's
enough
> to say the characters
> are fucked, either.
I truly intended to stay out of it this time, but you guys
seem to go to such lengths to avoid the obvious that I'm
forced to comment.
"Noir" dates from roughly the mid- 20th Century for the
simple reason that the term was coined, by Gallimard's
mystery editor, Marcel Duhamel, to describe a type of crime
fiction that was conceived, gestated, and was born during
that time. He called Gallimard's mystery line SERIE NOIR for
no other reason than that it was humorous play on words. The
phrase, UNE SERIE NOIR, or "a black series," means roughly
the same thing in France that "a run of bad luck" means over
here. It was just meant as a humorous nickname for the
(mostly) American, (mostly) hard-boiled crime fiction that
the company was publishing in post-war France. It wasn't, and
(since I think the line is still in existence), isn't meant
to have some kind of deep, existential meaning. It was just a
kind of humorous short-hand to describe the kind of mystery
novels Gallimard was publishing. Some of the early SERIE NOIR
authors included such hard-boiled luminaries as Dashiell
Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Jonathan Latimer, William P.
McGivern, etc.
In other words, when the word was coined to describe a
particular kind of crime fiction, it certainly wasn't meant
to EXCLUDE hard-boiled stories, and was probably taken more
as a synonym for hard-boiled (which is how publishers in the
US tend to use it now). Nor was it meant to exclude any story
that had good triumphing over evil at the end, because that
happened in a lot of the SERIE NOIR books (though it also
failed to happen in a lot of others).
So trying to find a distinction between "hard-boiled" and
"noir" is an effort doomed to failure because the terms,
though perhaps not synonomous as US publishers seem to think,
are not, and were never meant to be, mutually
exclusive.
Now if people want to go back and retrospectively include,
say, Wilkie Collins, or Edgar Allan Poe, or even Conan Doyle,
as noir (if not hard-boiled) because those authors are so
well able to maintain a dark sinsiter atmosphere in their
books, I've got no real problem with that. But that the term,
coined in post-war France to describe a type of crime story
prevalent in that era, must, consequently, REFER to those
stories and to that era seems to obvious on its face that I
don't see why it's worth agonizing over.
Miker:
> > Using this definition, Hamlet is
noir.
Kerry:
> Yeah, and Macbeth, and man, if you've seen the
movie
> Titus. That Shaky Bill
> was something when it came to writing
stories
> readily adaptable to the
> screen. Leonard could learn a thing or two,
and
> probably has. But I see
> your point. Why not just call it all tragedy
and
> have done with it?
For the simple reason that all noir is not, by definition,
tragic, and, while Shakespeare certainly can do the dark,
sinister thing in his plays, and though his tragedies contain
a lot of dark, sinister atmospherics, and even a lot of
crime, as Kerry points out later, "noir" refers to a type of
CRIME fiction, and crime fiction, as a genre, (as opposed to
fiction with crime) didn't really begin to gel as a separate,
distinct genre until the mid-19th Century. Further, re that
very comment of Kerry's . . .
> . . . you've added
> one thing to the
> definition that, surprisingly, we've overlooked
in
> the past. Crime. There
> has to be a crime involved. Noir is a sub-genre
of
> crimewriting, in my
> opinion anyway.
We haven't overlooked it. It was IMPLICIT, for crying out
loud! Rara-Avis is a list devoted to crime fiction,
generally, and hard-boiled/noir fiction, specifically. It was
always understood, or it SHOULD have always been understood,
that it was a sub-species of crime fiction we were talking
about. It didn't NEED to be stated.
JIM DOHERTY
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