Jack:
"[Noir] can also be condensed to one word, 'screwed.' With
all of that, surely someone and often the protagonist is
screwed."
Jim:
"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."
I'm down with Jack's "screwed" definition. And though they're
all dead, there is a big difference between the murder
victims in cozies and noir, as Chandler pointed out in The
Simple Art of Murder. Paraphrasing, we don't know the corpses
in cozies. They're often dead before we even meet them;
they're just there to set up a puzzle. However, we know the
victims in noir well enough to know how and why they came to
be screwed.
Mark
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