I had always believed that noir describes, gives reality
checks, and faces clearly the power of violence, predatory
behavior, and self-deception. No one is relieved of guilt or
moral compromise. Therefore the sinister, brooding atmosphere
it projects. But recently I read Steve Lopez's 1994 novel
_Third and Indiana_, about the organized drug trade in
Philadelphia, set in the "badlands" section of Kensington. It
has all the ingredients of noir: young teens trapped in the
distribution system and unable to escape from the sadistic
drug lord, except when he murders them b/c he suspects them
of shorting him, or just wants to spread terror. It's very
good about the social injustice, governmental hypocrisy
(hiding indifference behind propaganda about "a war on
"drugs" and "super-predators"), and newspaper priorities that
focus on sensational thefts but ignore the suffering of the
decent but poor residents who lose sons and daughters to
addiction, or murder at the hands of the organized criminals.
But Lopez's moving and tragic ending is clearly designed to
make readers take action: with melodramatic eloquence, Lopez
incites, even shames, his readers. I assume that this, then,
is a proletarian and polemic novel of social protest,
therefore not noir and not hardboiled (in that hardboiled has
connotations of noir). It does not (at least at the end)
project that sinister, brooding, resigned noir aura. I assume
that novelists who can be called noir, like Cain, McCoy,
Algren, Dahlberg, Fante, or Benjamin Appel are not social
reformers or proletarian novelists inciting to social change,
and that social reformers like James T Farrell, John Dos
Passos or Michael Gold, however much they deal with evil, the
criminal underclass, and political corruption, cannot be
considered noir or hardboiled. Does this distinction make
sense?
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