The Noir Thriller --Page 1

Sudden violence signifies a radical disruption of normal existence.
Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? opens with the gentle
and non-violent narrator recalling the moment at which he fired a
bullet into Gloria’s head; in Paul Cain’s Fast One, Gerry Kells just wanted
‘to be let alone’, but has been ‘mixed up in five shootings in the last
thirty-two hours’ (58, 67); in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, after 16
murders in less than a week, the Continental Op says that he fears he
himself is going ‘blood-simple’ (139). Only half-jokingly, Raymond
Chandler suggested that the main principle of construction in the hard-
boiled thriller was ‘When in doubt, have a man come through a door
with a gun in his hand.’¹ His comments on the role of the man with a
gun are a reflection on the reading public’s appetite for violent action,
but Chandler also argues in the same essay that the ‘smell of fear’ gen-
erated by such stories was evidence of their serious response to the
modern condition:

Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine-gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night.²

The noir thriller began to develop as a popular form in the aftermath
of one devastating war and came to maturity in the two decades that
terminate in a second world war. In its most characteristic narratives,
some traumatic event irretrievably alters the conditions of life and
creates for its characters an absolute experiential divide between their
dependence on stable, predictable patterns and the recognition that life
is, in truth, morally chaotic, subject to randomness and total disloca-
tion. In the best-known parable of ordinary life disrupted, Dashiell
Hammett’s Sam Spade tells the story of Flitcraft, who comes to realise
life’s arbitrariness and absurdity when he is nearly killed by a falling
beam. The thrillers of the period repeatedly represent the sort of trans-
formation that leaves the protagonist feeling, as Flitcraft does, that
‘someone had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works’ (The
Maltese Falcon, 429). In one of Benjamin Appel’s stories, ‘Brothers in
Hell’s Kitchen’ (1935), two brothers fail to understand one another
because only the elder has gone through World War One and therefore
‘couldn’t be the same inside’; the younger, at the end, thinks he has
gained the upper hand over the brother who is ‘all wiped up’, but then

reflects,   ‘ME, I’m younger, I got something ahead of me. What, he
thought, another war?’ (Hell’s Kitchen, 124-5). This sense of disillusion-
ment in the years between the wars was heightened by political and
economic  disasters  for  which  people  were  wholly  unprepared.  In
America there was the folly of Prohibition and its attendant gangster-
ism, as well as growing evidence of illicit connections between crime,
business and politics in American cities. Crises afflicted both American
and European economies, bringing the stock market crash of 1929 and
the Great Depression, which Keynes saw as the worst catastrophe of
modern times. With the failure of parliamentary governments in Europe
and the rise of totalitarian dictatorships, there was the spectre of
another war.

In the noir fiction of this period, the anxious sense of fatality is
usually attached to a pessimistic conviction that economic and socio-
political circumstances will deprive people of control over their lives by
destroying their hopes and by creating in them the weaknesses of char-
acter that mark them out as victims. In post-World War Two thrillers, a
protagonist’s fate is most often linked to difference from others, to an
isolating inability or refusal to conform to conventional expectations.
Interwar thrillers, on the other hand, incline to economic determinism,
stressing the pressures exerted by an economically unjust and frag-
menting society. Where the psychology of the characters is explored,
it is predominantly in terms of ordinary human shortcomings. For
example, obsession with success, aggressive drives, self-deception and
lying to others are presented as weaknesses of character that precipitate
disaster under the strain of adverse socio-economic conditions. The
thrillers of this period are frequently described as ‘harshly realistic’, but
their focus on the real conditions and problems of interwar society is
repeatedly joined to the fantastic and the symbolic. Violence itself,
though it is sometimes no more than ‘thriller sensationalism’, can take
on symbolic force, as, for example, in Hammett’s Red Harvest or Paul
Cain’s Fast One. There are heightened, sometimes surreal descriptions
of threatening and oppressive scenes or of destruction and viciousness.
Amongst the most memorable images of the period’s thrillers are the
hellishness of Daly’s Satan Hall stories and of Hammett’s Red Harvest,
the terrible brutality of a corrupt society encountered in Burnett’s Little
Caesar and Armitage Trail’s Scarface, the blackly satiric or tragic scenes
of entrapment by misfortune that dominate McCoy’s novels and the
work of James M. Cain. This combination of abrasive realism and satiric
intensification is a hallmark of tough-guy writing. As David Madden
argues in Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, these are novels that provide

‘stylised exaggeration of very real traits in the American character . . . the nightmare version of the American Dream’.³

The preoccupation with characters goaded or defeated by adversity
was often interpreted, by interwar critics of both the tough thriller
and  film  noir,  as  an  acceptance  or  even  encouragement  of  moral
bankruptcy. It was seen as a form of collusion in the neurosis and
violence of the world depicted. George Orwell, for example, in ‘Raffles
and  Miss  Blandish’ (1944),  attacked  James  Hadley  Chase (René

Raymond) and his ‘half-understood import from America’ as a debased
expression of the ‘moral atmosphere’ of the age that witnessed the rise
of fascism:

In his imagined world of gangsters Chase is presenting, as it were, a
distilled version of the modern political scene, in which such things
as mass bombings of civilians, the use of hostages, torture to obtain
confessions, secret prisons, execution without trial, floggings with
rubber truncheons, drownings in cesspools, systematic falsification
of  records  and  statistics,  treachery,  bribery  and  quislingism  are
normal and morally neutral, even admirable when they are done in
a large and bold way.

The essay complains that ‘lowbrow fiction’ has followed modernist
literature and the ‘serious novel’ (Lawrence, for example) in abandon-
ing all sense of ‘a sharp distinction between right and wrong and
between legality and illegality’. It is one thing for the intelligentsia to
think in this way, but quite another for the mass of the population: now
that ‘Freud  and  Machiavelli  have  reached  the  outer  suburbs’,  the
‘common people’ will lose completely their moral bearings.⁴

Orwell’s criticism is echoed in John Houseman’s often quoted dispar-
agement (in 1947) of film noir as lacking in moral energy, giving in to
‘fatalistic despair’ and representing people ‘groping their way through
a twilight of insecurity and corruption’.⁵  Like Chandler’s assertion of
the ‘authentic power’ of such thrillers, the comments of Orwell and
Houseman focus on social and political content - on the fact that these
films and novels refer to a world in crisis, destabilised by one war and
moving into another. Orwell’s protest is a backhanded acknowledge-
ment of the relevance of the newer kind of crime novel to events in
Europe (a relevance made clear, for example, in Brecht’s or Graham
Greene’s use of mythologised gangsters as emblems of fascist violence).
What Orwell in effect denies is that such fiction can do more than
‘express’ the disintegrating moral atmosphere of the time. To take his

own example, the truth of the matter is that, beneath the surface of the
American tough-guy pastiche, Chase is exploring the pressing question
(one raised by many British thrillers of the thirties), that is, the extent
to which passivity should be judged culpable in the face of psychopathic
violence. For most writers of the time, such themes are much more to
the fore than they are in No Orchids for Miss Blandish. In taking as their
subject what Ezra Pound called ‘disillusions never told in the old days’,
‘serious’ thriller writers of the interwar period judge the society por-
trayed. In breaking with the existing conventions of the detective novel,
they provide, from the early twenties on, a form of popular fiction that
deals critically with the ‘wrongness’ of ‘a world gone wrong’ and that
confronts the catastrophes brought about by the intrusion of violence,
the betrayal of trust and the corrupt exercise of power.

The noir thriller had its forerunners (Conrad, Dickens, Dostoevsky,
amongst others), but the 1920s was the period in which it became firmly
established as popular fiction. The label ‘hard-boiled’ began to be

applied, distinguishing this departure in crime-writing from the classic
detective story. The most important publication of the twenties in
encouraging and marketing the new kind of crime story was Black Mask.
The magazine was founded in 1920 by H. L. Mencken and George Jean
Nathan, who sold it after half a year, and from then on it was given
over to crime, adventure and western stories. In the early 1920s, Dashiell
Hammett and Carroll John Daly began writing for Black Mask, and the
identity of the magazine became more sharply defined when the edi-
torship was taken over in 1926 by Captain Joseph T. Shaw. Shaw encour-
aged a high standard of colloquial, racy writing, favouring ‘economy of
expression’ and ‘authenticity in character and action’,⁶ all of which are
important features of the hard-boiled style. Shaw greatly increased the
circulation of Black Mask, and other pulp magazines (for example, Dime
Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, Black Aces) were soon competing in
some numbers. Several of the writers discussed in this section were
amongst the regular contributors to Black Mask: in addition to Daly and
Hammett, Frederick Nebel, Raoul Whitfield, Paul Cain (George Sims),
Raymond Chandler, Horace McCoy.

Although much ‘hard-boiled’ fiction is in essential respects closer to
the traditional adventure story than to ‘noir’, there is considerable
common ground. In examining the development of literary noir, I will
begin with a discussion of the American hard-boiled investigator - a
tough, independent, often solitary figure, a descendant of the frontier
hero and cowboy but, as reimagined in the 1920s, a cynical city-dweller:
‘He finds no way out. And so he is slugged, shot at, choked, doped, yet

he survives because it is in his nature to survive.’⁷  He can achieve a
degree of control, but, unlike the classic Holmesian detective, he cannot
restore order and set all to rights. The basic narrative pattern pits this
lone investigator against brutal criminals, often in league with a corrupt
power structure. His function is in some respects analogous to that of
the satirist:⁸ he exposes and punishes, though by no means always
claiming the moral high ground. One of the main contrasts I will look
at in the hard-boiled stories and novels of this period is that between
two types of investigators: on the one hand, those who possess some
form of moral superiority (Chandler’s Marlowe comes first to mind); on
the other, those who are more implicated in the world of corruption,
depicted as entering into a scene of disorder and acknowledging their
own anarchic tendencies and capacity for violence (as in the novels of
Hammett, Paul Cain and Raoul Whitfield). These ‘compromised’ inves-
tigators are key figures in the evolution of literary noir, which, as it
develops in the late 1920s and the 1930s, turns to the portrayal of
deeply flawed, transgressive, often criminal protagonists.

In the thrillers of this time it is the character of the male protagonist
that has the clearest relationship to the novel’s theme and structure. In
contrast to the post-World War Two period, the roles of female charac-
ters tend not to be of determining importance. The women represented
are often defined primarily as the helpers of the men, either as, say, the
gangster’s moll or as the basically tough, good girl who helps the down-
trodden gangster or endangered victim (for example, Marie in Burnett’s
High Sierra, Keechie in Anderson’s Thieves Like Us, the character of Mid-
night in Woolrich’s Black Path of Fear, the Communist heroine in No
Pockets in a Shroud and Grandquist in Fast One). There are some notable
examples of the femme fatale in Chandler’s novels and occasionally in
the work of Hammett and James M. Cain, but it is only really with the
post-World War Two boom in paperback thrillers that this iconic figure
comes into her own. My main subject in this section, then, will be the
shifting representations of the male protagonists. The second and third
chapters will deal, respectively, with the criminal and the victim. In
Chapter 2, I look at the novels of Paul Cain, James M. Cain, W. R.
Burnett,  Armitage  Trail (Maurice  Coons),  Benjamin  Appel,  Edward

Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, and consider the various ways in
which crime-centred narratives use the rebellious figure of the criminal
and the hierarchical structure of the criminal organisation both to chal-
lenge and to ironise capitalism and the business ethic. Having made a
career  of  illegality,  the  gangster  functions  as  the  dark  double  of
‘respectable’ society, undermining its claims to legitimacy and parody-

ing the American drive to succeed. Chapter 3 focuses on the ordinary
man as victim, wrongly persecuted or finding himself doomed to failure
in the commission of a crime. A weak and ineffectual character, the
victim-protagonist lacks the survival skills of the investigator or gang-
ster; he can serve a purpose within the novel comparable to that of the
satiric naif who acts as foil to those who are corruptly competent. In
the American novels included here (by, for example, Horace McCoy,
James M. Cain, Richard Hallas [Eric Knight] and Cornell Woolrich) eco-
nomic determinism is often very pronounced, as it is, of course, in other
naturalistic fiction of the time. Characters have little scope for effective
action, and the narratives tend towards bleak, suicidal pessimism.

The second and third chapters also include British thrillers of the
interwar period. At a time when the main threat of violence seemed to
come from the rise of aggressive continental political ideologies, writers
of serious British thrillers - Eric Ambler, for example, and Graham

Greene - tended to cast the armed gangster in the role of fascist thug
and to represent the victim-protagonist as a man who hesitates to act
against fascist violence for fear of losing his own humanity. In novels
such as these, narratives are often constructed in a way that foregrounds
Orwell’s  equation  of  criminal  brutality  with  the  atrocities  of  the
‘modern political scene’. They aim, however, not simply to shock but
to explore the dangerous dilemmas faced by those accustomed to what
Orwell, in another essay of the time (‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’),
called ‘the sheltered conditions of English life’.⁹