A propos the recurring hb/noir thread, I thought I'd repost
an extract from an article on Cornell Woolrich that was in
Crime Time a couple of issues back.
It might not suit everybody's take on the hb/noir theme, but
I think it's a useful way to present the distinction.
ED
***** Hard-boiled or noir?
Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain are the
leading lights among what used to be called 'the tough guy
writers'; this unholy trinity would now be recognised as
forming the core of what we might call 'classic' hard-boiled
fiction. Sharing some of the hard-boiled sensibilities of
these exponents of the 'tough guy' style, but also diverging
from them in several important ways, are a group of writers-I
would call them a 'second wave'-that might be identified as
'noir' rather than 'hard-boiled'. Among this second wave one
can include Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Cornell
Woolrich.
The main difference between the 'classic' hard-boiled writers
and the
'noir writers'-although James M. Cain has a foot in each
camp-can probably be characterised by two tendencies: a
tendency in hardboiled writing to paint a backdrop of
institutionalised social corruption; and a tendency in noir
writing to focus on personal psychology, whether it is
despair, paranoia or some other psychological crisis. The two
schools-if we can call these tendencies 'schools'-are by no
means mutually exclusive: hard boiled writing can display
elements of noir, and noir writing can be hard-boiled.
Institutionalised corruption is taken as given among the
hard-boiled school: corrupt institutions (the police force,
the judiciary, politicians), and indeed there are several
'bad cop' stories in the Woolrich cannon, just as there are
elements of psychological development in the Hammett corpus
(the Continental Op stories, for example).
By the same token, there are mean streets in the world of
noir, though these streets are peopled by the psychologically
insecure: psychological instability is the key characteristic
of the protagonists of noir writing, if not the key
characteristic of the noir writers themselves
(see, for example, 'Life's A Bitch: paranoia and sexuality in
the novels of David Goodis' in Crime Time 2.1). Paranoid
insecurity, doubts and fears about identity, sexuality and
personal safety are the key fault-lines of the noir
personality.
In Cornell Woolrich's noir world, one routinely finds these
traits of despair. The fear expressed in Woolrich's fiction
may be one of the ways in which he worked through his own
psychological traumas, or Woolrich's writing might be thought
of as a kind of social barometer, through which the pressures
and tensions of wider cultural fears and anxieties are
indicated.
In the post war era, ideas about masculinity had to be
re-negotiated as women were reluctantly eased out of their
wartime roles and persuaded by various means, including
popular novels and films, to give up their newly found
independence to return to their former domestic roles. Apart
from the 'menace' of the independent woman, post-war America
felt particularly at risk from the threat of communism. As
America underwent the cultural revolution of McCarthyism,
during which time Hollywood sought to 'out' the politically
suspect, fears about individuals-or larger social
groups-being 'taken over' by sinister unseen forces,
sometimes represented as aliens or plants from outer space;
or by chemicals, as characters are 'drugged' or otherwise
lose control, were prevalent in popular fiction. It should
come as no surprise then, that during the nineteen forties
and nineteen fifties, at the height of America's cultural and
political paranoia, Woolrich was at his productive
peak.
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