So you want to write noir

by Cornelius Lehane

"Noir is like the blues," Russell James wrote here recently. "It is as therapeutic as the blues. A good tragedy, as the ancient Greeks could tell you, uplifts the soul."

What a wonderful analogy!  It explains to me why I don't find writers like Jim Thompson or David Goodis depressing and why I cringe when my characters -- or the characters in other noir works -- are called losers. I never thought they were. What's compelling in these works to me is not the doom, not the lousy hand that's been dealt our protagonist. Rather, what gives nobility and raises many of the books I read to level of tragedy is that our n'er-do-well, sad sack, loser hero -- like Syssiphus-- struggles against the fates, against the absurd.

What I liked best about all these books, what I looked for and loved in books like Shoot the Piano Player -- and this is where the blues come in -- was no matter how bleak the landscape, no matter the vain struggle of the doomed protagonist, there was something life affirming in these stories. The hero, such as he is -- probably doomed from the start, but struggling nonetheless with all his might to overcome the fates -- our noir hero may be a "loser" but he's not a "quitter."

James's characterization of the noir makes me feel pretty good about being  called a noir writer myself, though at times I feel like an imposter. For one thing, I don't fit into a least one part of Russell James's definition -- I write about a series character. For another, I never started out to be a noir writer, and, I have to admit, I had never paid much attention to the genre. I get the label, I think, because the folks I write about tend to travel the mean streets. My characters are not heroic, nor are they especially tough. Not only does my main character, McNulty, not share in the American Dream, he views the dream and the smug satisfaction of contemporary society as a fraud. My stories are dark, dealing in aspects of the human character those comfortable in life would prefer to not think about. Most important for me, my characters try to approach life without illusions. You might say that at least some of them are doomed -- and so they are. But then aren't we all?

Yet I don't buy the terms hopeless or doomed as applied to my work. If I have a vision at all, which is pretty doubtful, it is a recognition of the absurd. But with this comes a commitment to be among those who, in Camus's words, choose life. It is this belief, I think, that casts suspicion on my noir credentials. Nonetheless, I hope to hang onto them.

I was adopted into the ranks of the noir by Francois Guerif, a Crown Prince of Noir, who was the first to publish my book -- in French, in France, though the story takes place in New York City and I wrote it in English. The moment I learned my book would be published by Rivages/Noir, was the moment I discovered I might be a noir writer. All at once, there I was, thrown in with the likes of Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Charles Willeford, and a whole passel of other likely suspects.  Trying to get my bearings, I began reading the books of my fellow workers at Rivages/Noir -- most of whom I was unfamiliar with. I began with Jim Thompson, went to Cornell Woolrich, to Derek Raymond, to Charles Willeford and David Goodis.

I began by asking myself -- after reading books such as The Killer Inside Me -- am I really this twisted? How did I get mixed up with this group of doom-enshrouded, depraved chroniclers of the lost and damned? I have a wife and kids, dogs and cats. I live in the suburbs, for Christ's sake.  But I ended up loving the books I was reading: Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Charles Willeford. I found virtually no similarity in style or voice or vision among them. You couldn't, for example, take a passage from Willeford and drop it into a David Goodis novel. These writers are, as prolific as some of them were, to my way of looking at it, unique. So I concluded that even if I don't fit so neatly into tried and true definitions of noir, I've gotten myself here now, by hook or by crook, and I intend to stay as long as I can -- the appeal all the greater, as Groucho might say, because the group is not so sure it wants to let me in.

Copyright© 2003 Cornelius Lehane

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CORNELIUS LEHANE has been a college professor, a union organizer, and, for more than a decade, a bartender. After spending most of his life in and around New York City, he now works in Washington, DC, as a labor journalist and lives in a DC suburb with his wife, two sons, and an assortment of pets. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction writing from Columbia University School of the Arts.
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