“In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.”--Raymond Chandler

The French called them Serie Noire: dark fictions, sometimes about detectives, always about crime, obsession, suspicion, betrayal; stories of haunted underworlds that lay just beneath the sunny optimism of mid-twentieth-century American life. (Greatly admired in France, most of the great noir writers were American, just as film noir, the cinematic counterpart, was an American innovation of style.) Some noir authors, like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, achieved a measure of literary respect; others, like Jim Thompson and David Goodis, were considered pulp hacks, and their works were obscurely hoarded cult classics until recent revivals brought them back into print.

Noir novelists paint a fallen universe, where murder is expected and duplicity is the coin of the realm. They draw characters living at the hard edges of human behavior; they show us evil people, and also good people pursued by evil fate; like the best satirists, many noir writers are moralists at heart. They see the world’s darkness, and our own, and will not look away.

Here are six noir classics to discover and rediscover.

Shoot the Piano Player (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) by David Goodis. This novel was originally published as Down There, but later reissued using the title of the Truffault film it inspired (a favorite of Bob Dylan’s, for those who note such things). Eddie, the musician protagonist, personifies one type of noir hero, the good man who wishes to do right but is ensnared by fate. There’s violence here, but the mood of loneliness and melancholy longing is what lingers; the writing often achieves a gritty poetry, especially in the astonishing final chapter.

Crime Novels :American Noir of the 1930s and 40s Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham. I’m a sucker for an evil carnival story, and this one is as dark as they come: the ruthless rise and fall of a magician turned psychic con man. But the complicated plot, with its crosses and double-crosses, is really only window dressing for the writer’s grimly fatalistic worldview, as when an unsavory morgue attendant offers the hero a peep at a suicidal stripper: There were the breasts Doree had snapped by their nipples under the amber spotlight, the belly which rotated for the crowd of smoke-packed old men and pimply kids, the long legs which spread in the final bump as she made her exit. Her nail polish was chipped and broken off; a tag with her name on it was tied to one thumb; her wrists were bandaged. "Good-looking tomato--once."

The Cornell Woolrich Omnibus: Waltz Into Darkness. A noir novel with an atypical setting--New Orleans circa 1880--but with a classic noir black widow heroine. Early on she kills a little bird because its singing annoys her, and we know things can only go downhill from here. What begins as a stylized, almost jaunty tale turns into a nightmarish ode to obsession. It’s paired in The Cornell Woolrich Omnibus with short stories and another novel, I Married a Dead Man. In addition to a classic title, Dead Man has a plot idea so compelling it inspired several films and probably indirectly influenced countless more (While You Were Sleeping comes to mind): What if you could leave your own life behind and become someone else? Here, a lonely, desperate woman is given the chance to shelter herself in the safety of another woman’s privileged suburban life--but shelter isn’t always safety, and privilege has its price.

The Getaway (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) by Jim Thompson. If Dante lived in 1950s America and wrote pulp-noir crime fiction, then The Getaway is surely the book he’d write. Having seen the old Steve McQueen movie before reading the book, I was expecting a basic Bonnie & Clyde/lovers on the lam thriller; I was mistaken. As the story progresses, Thompson takes us ever deeper into a surreal, allegorical world that’s more magical realism than mystery. We begin with a bank robbery and the flight of Doc, a career criminal, and Carol, a librarian gone bad, and somewhere a shift occurs and the horrors grow more outrageous and extravagant. You tell yourself it is a bad dream. But you know better. At last it all makes sense: this is an underworld story indeed, a descent into hell.

Cutter and Bone (Midnight Classics) by Newton Thornberg. This dark, dark journey is a neo-noir, a detective story without a detective, a murder mystery without a solution, only a raw glimpse into a world where no motives are clean and no ground can be trusted not to shift under your feet. Alex Cutter is a maimed, volatile Vietnam vet who lives on the thin edge of rage and despair; Richard Bone is a burned-out ex-husband, deadbeat dad, and former ad man turned drifter and gigolo. If this novel has a hero, they’re it--and the strangest thing in this strange trip is that, as twisted and imperfect as these characters are in their quest to bring to justice (or blackmail) a teenage girl’s murderer, we are with them, hoping for some unlikely salvation, all the way to the end.

The Long Goodbye (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) by Raymond Chandler, who found inspiration watching his wife do housework in the nude--or so says a factoid I read recently. If true, then Cissy Chandler must have been cleaning up a storm in the early 1950s, when this novel was being written. It’s Chandler’s most complex and haunting work: more melancholy than hardboiled, and more concerned with moral apathy than criminal or political chicanery, though both are present. There is murder and suicide and betrayal, but mostly there is Philip Marlowe, in his aloneness and stubborn honor, neither tarnished nor afraid. Alas, The Long Goodbye was prophetically titled for Chandler. Cissy died in 1954, and his inspiration with her; The Long Goodbye was his last major work. Still, it’s a worthy, and lovely, farewell.

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Kathryn Kulpa is a fiction writer, a former editor of Merlyn’s Pen, and a current editor of Pif. She is also co-teaching the Providence-area Fiction Writing Workshop with Kiersten Marek. You can read a short profile of Kathryn at Merlyn's Pen, and her fiction is online at Margin and Zuzu’s Petals Quarterly.

Copyright © 2002 Kathryn Kulpa. All rights reserved.

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