American Noir, Part I

On the misogyny of crime fiction, and the persistence of the femme fatale

A man with a troubled past sits behind a desk and a woman — in a hat and veil or a clinging sheath number or a pressed suit depending on the decade — walks in, and brings with her a load of more complicated trouble. That’s how the scene starts —immobility in the man, and the woman a mobile agent, pure flesh and expression — but the roles switch tiresomely and fast. Soon the man’s all action, all movement, usually violent movement, and the woman becomes scenic decoration, with the occasional toothsome set-piece staged for sexual tension, though little enough comes through. To want sex, you have to be a person who wants a lot of things — from toast in the morning to relief from menstrual cramps to the hard bright thrill of achievement and belonging. And perilously few of the great bards of noir manage to write a woman that reads as anything more than a cipher: barely human, a sketch in dark lipstick, or, conveniently, dead. 

Noir is just the French word for black, though the genre in its origins is thoroughly white, alongside most of its authors; what the term refers to is an atmosphere of cynicism, murder, jaded romanticism and sex, urbanity and corruption. I’ve spent most of my career as a writer trying to get a handle on what America is all about, a project that greater minds than mine have wrestled with to no ultimate satisfaction. But noir is a well and truly American genre, born in the American West and suffusing the American century, and I wanted to know the taste of it, all ink, blood, and quippy insouciance. That’s the way I always dive into things — headfirst, heedless, eager, insatiable — only to come up against the infinite difficulty of knowing anything in any real way. To make a true study of a subject is like loving: you have to give of yourself to love, and give of yourself to really study anything deep down, and if you learn too hard or love too hard there’s too little of you left. You’re dissipate as mist over the Pacific.

But while the hunger lasts it lasts, and more or less without surcease, I read like a person possessed. I read Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Serenade by James M. Cain, the progenitor of the hardboiled genre. I read The Dain Curse, Red Harvest, and The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett; The Big Sleep, The High Window, The Lady in the Lake, Farewell, My Lovely, and The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler; seventeen (!) novels from the Lew Archer series by Ross MacDonald, including The Galton Case and The Zebra-Striped Hearse and The Goodbye Look; Bedelia and Laura by Vera Caspary; Ride the Pink Horse, In A Lonely Place, and The Expendable Man by Dorothy Hughes; Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith; The Beast in View by Margaret Millar; and have started Dark Passage by David Goodis. 

At this point I’m so hard-boiled if you dropped me in a pot I’d just sit on the dark bottom and smoke. The books go down easy as a cold martini, so this isn’t a testament to my reading prowess; more of a consideration that the tropes and faults of a genre get bigger when the landscape of their creation goes past so quickly it blurs.

There are hundreds and thousands of gritty detective novels and crime novels and noir novels and mob novels, but the logical place for any journey is the origin, and the origin of noir is out West, in the interwar and post-war years of the twentieth century, roughly 1936 to 1963. James Cain’s stories are of violent drifters and of middle-class criminals seeking the high life — he even told the same story twice and got it filmed both times, a ragged little tale of insurance-fraud murder. With Chandler, MacDonald and Hammett the private eye takes center stage, not unlike a knight-errant of Arthurian legend: a man with a code but no liege lord, a man prone to adventure. This likeness was literalized when Akira Kurosawa turned Hammett’s Red Harvest into Yojimbo, the story of a ronin — a rogue samurai — who similarly upends a town by turning its villains against each other. Cloudless California, with occasional excursions into bordering states, was the site for this flowering: all the murders are hedged in by manzanita and jacaranda and the big hungry sea, and everyone is driving all the time, and everybody has a gun. 

Cain, Chandler and Hammett each served in America’s wars: Cain fought in the infamously bloody Battle of the Marne in World War I, and barely survived a poison-gas attack. Chandler, too, did his time in the trenches; Hammett served in the Motor Ambulance Corps in France, and saw soldiers around him die by the score during the Spanish-flu pandemic. All three came back having witnessed carnage and been part of it and it suffuses their writing: restless ghosts coming back through labyrinthine plots. In the decades after the war, they were no longer boy soldiers, but they had been part of a great and history-changing tide of violence, until it foundered in the lean years of the Depression. There was no more West to be won, the country reached the Pacific, the dream was manifest. But it curled and clung in their discontent, so they created a literature of disillusionment.

Noir is a genre in which corruption — among booze-soaked shamuses and petty criminals and dirty cops — is both the assumed state of the world and its color, a bone-deep cynicism that pervades the texts, seeping out sometimes as dry wit and sometimes as despair. That most of early noir is set in California highlights the contrast: Hollywoodland and its big gilded promises, and the seaminess of the events that unfold within it, are forced into juxtaposition, and everything comes out dingy as old brass. 

---

The Sword and the Sandwich is a newsletter about serious extremism and equally serious sandwiches. Please consider supporting this work with a paid subscription:

---

Much of the early noir canon is hypermasculine: in The Big Sleep a pert blonde hurls herself into Philip Marlowe’s arms before introducing herself; Hammett’s nameless Continental Op lets loose an extraordinary tide of violence in Red Harvest and more or less revels in it; Cain’s protagonists are rugged drifters who indulge both lust and bloodlust, often without divulging their names. The men’s desires are more or less simple, even the crooked ones: sex, money, power, the satisfaction of resolving a case. The women are more cryptic. They’re beautiful and hollow, their bodies described in detail on the page, their minds whirring to no legible purpose except mayhem. 

The recurrence of the femme fatale and the undemanding nature of her construction makes a lot of these tales fall flat; their grace and endurance lie not in the often excruciatingly muddled plots (Chandler in particular often stitched his novels together from previously written short stories and left the seams showing) but in their prose, the good jazz of the slung sentence. When the words are good they’re as intoxicating as any of the bourbon the gumshoes drink — the highballs and lowballs and bathtub gin of the American knight-errant, half wastrel, half hero. The man always conveniently slugged with a blackjack or struck with a tire iron instead of just shot (a narrative convenience as preposterous as any superhero connivance, and occurring for much the same reasons), who straggles to the end of the complex case, driven by compulsion and romance. The joy of them is style; the failure is a failure of sympathetic imagination, a particular shortcoming of Chandler’s, whose humid prose fails to conceal a deep coldness towards the general run of humanity. 

This failure is summed up in the femme fatale. The reasons she does what she does, the contents of her mind, are hardly worth examining, just the allure of her body and the havoc she wreaks. The whys of people come more naturally to the women writers of noir — which I’ll be exploring more next week — and are in fact their chief subject; in the novels of Highsmith and Hughes and Caspary no one is fully good, but no one is empty either.

Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, written by Raymond Chandler and based on the novel by James M. Cain

In the world of noir, the figure of the femme fatale keeps turning up like a bad penny, unto and beyond the point of tedium; she’s a devil ex machina with shapely gams, or a good-little-hausfrau fronting double or even quadruple murder (as in some of MacDonald’s more extravagant tales). The sex kitten of dubious morals who wields her body as a weapon (and often wields a weapon too) fills the books with a sense that sexual desire is dangerous, and that by transitive property its objects must be dangerous too, mortally so. In the demure wife who turns out to be diabolical under her apron is a cautionary tale about domesticity — that kitchens have knife drawers, that dreams about good homes don’t come true. 

At the very root of noir is a deep hostility to women — the women who weren’t there on the Somme or the Marne or in Okinawa when the authors’ lives blew apart, but were there on their return, and expected things of them, like love, or intimacy made impossible by alienation. Their revenge came on the page, in novel after novel after novel (of the eighteen Lew Archer novels, femmes fatales turn out to be the murderers in most). It’s a revenge that’s still being carried out by their successors, and a pattern that has sunk deep into the American psyche, a hot revolver with six echo chambers of misogyny blatting out into the world. 

Still, the books are compulsively readable — with their wit and their slang and their propulsion, and the haggard sorrows that creep in at the edges, and their ambivalence, the way they love the big bright world and hate its guts and can’t stop trying to unravel its secrets. It could only have come from California, this genre of carmine lips and rain-drenched alleys: it’s the literature of the betrayed dream, the blood-drenched pot of the gold at the end of the rainbow.