So you want to write noir?

Do you really? You're not confusing noir, I trust, with hard boiled or tough guy adventure stories? Noir fiction is doom-laden and pessimistic. It may have humour, it will have action, but at the tale's black heart will be a character trapped in a situation from which there seems to be no escape. Some purists would go so far as to say there must be no escape. The plight of a desperate man (it usually is a man) fighting in vain against the fates marks out noir fiction and gives it its savour. This is not something new. Noir fiction is not an American invention, born out of Black Mask thrillers and 1930s B movies; it is a genre as old as literature itself. Think of the old Greek tragedies. Think Jacobean tragedy.

Noir today is more popular on screen than on the page. Before you snort denial, check the facts. Most of the writers we today consider as classic noir - Cornell Woolrich, David Goodis, Jim Thompson - died broke and out of favour. More recent, more successful exponents blend noir into another more acceptable genre - usually the police procedural or PI. Most publishers will tell you that people do not buy noir. They watch it, they talk about it - they may even hunt down second-hand pulp classics - but they do not buy noir books new. And publishers, for once, are right. Noir is a respected genre - hell, even publishers respect it; noir is an adjective they'll use in describing a work - and noir books stand a better chance than many of being reviewed by major critics, but the punters do not buy it. Perhaps they imagine noir to be gloomy, depressing reading - which it is not. Noir is like the blues. It is as therapeutic as the blues. A good tragedy, as the ancient Greeks could tell you, uplifts the soul.

But if you want to write noir, you'll want to be published. To get published you're likely to be tempted down one of two routes: either to conceal your noir heart in a PI or police procedural format, or to splatter the text with lashings of sex and violence. Forget the second. Sex and violence is not noir. (I'm as happy with sex and violence as the next man - as No One Gets Hurt will show you - but sex and violence does not make noir.) Disguising your noir theme in a PI or police procedural wrapper is a reasonable option but it has its pitfalls.

Publishers love PI tales and police procedurals because these books can become a series. Publishers love series, because series sell. But you cannot write a series and keep it noir. As you write one book after another you'll soften towards your characters; you'll soften their hard hearts and make them lovable. Even the excellent Patricia Highsmith softened towards her Ripley - a nasty and cowardly psychopath in book one, but an increasingly respectable middle class professional from then on. You'll give your hero one or two likeable characteristics - we'll get to know him. Even the pseudonymous Richard Stark couldn't stop us beginning to know and understand his deliberately blank, amoral villain/hero as the Stark books progressed. Most important of all: a series hero cannot die. A noir hero can die. It is the probability of his death that underlines the noir nature of the story.

That's why I do not write series. Each of my books stands alone. By the end of the book the hero may not stand at all. It's a one-off, with a one-off hero; there's no reason he has to survive. You understand this as you read the book, and it should increase your sense of dread. Leading characters - not necessarily the hero - die in every one of my books (except in the deliberately lighter Pick Any Title). I am a writer of dark stories. I am not writing The Perils Of Pauline. If a woman was ever strapped to the rails in one of my books, it is unlikely that any hero would arrive to save her. He'd certainly not arrive in the nick of time. Most probably he'd get there two minutes late.

Copyright© 2003 Russell James

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RUSSELL JAMES is a unique voice in modern crime writing. A writer's writer, he was called 'something of a cult' by The Times and Ian Rankin dubbed him 'the Godfather of British noir'. There are no detectives in his books, and when the police do appear it is on the sidelines. James concentrates on the criminals, their victims and those caught up in the events. When he started writing novels, he deliberately wrote counter to the spirit of the times - which was sex 'n' shopping and international conspiracy - and instead wrote dark, multi-layered thrillers, rich in character and locale: the kind of books more common from American authors, though Russell James' novels remain emphatically British. Russell James was Chairman of the Crime Writers' Association 2001-2002.  His novels include Underground, Daylight, Payback, Slaughter Music, Count Me Out, Oh No, Not My Baby, Painting In The Dark, Pick Any Title, The Annex and the forthcoming No One Gets Hurt (June 2003).
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