> I'm curious. You're obviously very well read in noir
now. Were you
> when you first started writing? It seems that most
artists start
by, if
Did you see yourself as following in
> the footsteps of any particular writers then? Were
they noir or did
> they come from a wider spectrum of
writing?
In the mid to late nineties the term noir wasn't nearly as
widely to describe fiction as it is now. Do you agree or was
this just my perception? In France it was used, of course,
but in the U.S. noir was used almost exclusively for film
noir (which, incidentally, I think has a much broader
definition than noir fiction. For example The Big Sleep is
undoubtedly a film noir, but the novel doesn't fit my
definition of noir at all. I don't think you can have a PI in
noir fiction, unless it's a Dave Zeltzerman novel)...So, back
to your question, when I started writing novels I wasn't even
aware of noir fiction. I'd been reading a lot of Jim
Thompson, Goodis, some Cain, a few others, but I didn't read
Willeford, Williams, White, Brewer, Whittington, etc until
much later. And I never thought of Thompson, for example, as
a noir writer. I had been reading a lot of dark suspense and
horror (and was very into horror movies) so I thought of
Thompson as a writer of psychological-horror (I still do,
actually). I thought Cain's books were dark suspense (and I
still do). The other main writers I was reading included
Elmore Leonard, David Mamet, Paul Auster, Ian McEwan, Paul
Bowles, and A LOT of playwrights.
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