Homework: Pin Up Noir

Sultry Murder Jazz!

Find all our open calls for 2025 here!

What we call noir actually started off as the school of hard-boiled crime writing, which began in Black Mask magazine under Dashiell Hammett and a few other authors. Hammett, as Chandler wrote in "The Simple Art of Murder," "gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, and not just to provide a corpse."

Chandler himself added two elements to the school: the idea of the hero as a tarnished knight of sorts, rather than a purely pragmatic tough guy; and a heightened use of language that sometimes verged on poetry.

The aftermath of World War II had at least two effects on the genre. It created a generation of readers who had no patience for sugar-coating and false "happily ever afters" who made Mickey Spillane a million-copy-plus selling author with his first Mike Hammer mystery; and it brought a realization that Hollywood had unwittingly created a film genre, the film noir, so named by French critics when they got a flood of Hollywood movies from, during and just after the war all at once, and saw common themes and motifs that had escaped American critics viewing them in realtime.

Film noir derives from the hard-boiled school of crime fiction, but it also imports a few things from Europe. The distinct shadowy look of noir came from German Expressionist films of the silent era, and a foreboding sense of doom that is, generally, not native to the American character. Though best exemplified by Sunset Boulevard, narrated by screenwriter Joe Gillis from beyond the grave, even films noir that have "happy" endings face the protagonist with his flaws head-on, and alter his world completely in the end.

Though film and fiction have long cross-pollinated and influenced each other, I am not sure when noir began to be used for fiction in place of "hard-boiled." Sometime in the last twenty years, I think.

If you want homework suggestions, first on the list is Chandler's essay "The Simple Art of Murder."

Some suggested reading includes:

Mickey Spillane
Dashiell Hammett
Raymond Chandler
Frederic Brown - The Fabulous Clipjoint, in particular

Movies:

The Big Sleep

Maltese Falcon

Farewell, My Lovely

The Big Heat

In a Lonely Place

And lest you think of noir as a definite genre, let us not forget that noir classic Blade Runner, and Minority Report, though probably less well-known, is also noir.