Jack,
Re your comment below:
> It can also be condensed to one word, "screwed."
With all
> of that, surely someone and often the protagonist
is
> screwed.
That's true, but even in the most gentle cozy someone is
murdered, which is about as screwed as you can get. In order
for noir to mean something other than a traditional mystery,
the person screwed has, by inference, to be the
protagonist.
And if "noir" means that the protagonist is ALWAYS screwed,
in some kind of ultimate sense, then, on the evidence of the
books Duhamel chose for his line, he got it wrong, which
strikes me as ludicrous, and puts us back on the same
merry-go-round.
JIM DOHERTY
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