The Noir thriller ----Page 4

Victims of Circumstance

Both the hard-boiled investigator and the career criminal have the kind
of masculine competence that enables them to achieve some degree of
mastery in a hostile world, however temporary and limited it might be.
Even Harry Fabian, though he is in most respects a failure, can, like Rico
or Scarface, be compared to counterparts in the world of business, gifted
with energy, perseverance and enough nous to enable him, in his small
way, to thrive: ‘He was not quite an ordinary person: he had highly
developed intuitions, proceeding from long cumulative experience of
the customs of the City’ (21). He knows what he is doing, and is single-
minded in the pursuit of his own interests. Like most other criminal
protagonists, he will end as a victim, but he will at least have put up a
plausible fight before becoming a casualty in the conflict. In many noir
thrillers of the period, however, the protagonist is a victim throughout,
one of the uninitiated who has acquired neither the special competence
of the private eye nor the underworld knowledge and sharply focused
survival instincts of the seasoned criminal: ‘and then,’ says one of
Horace McCoy’s narrators, ‘I said something to myself I had never said
before (but which I now knew had always been in the back of my mind):
I should have stayed home . . .’ (142). The cover of this McCoy novel, I
Should Have Stayed Home (1938 - see Figure 3), catches exactly the sense
of resignation and defeat so often felt by the characters in his novels.
Listless and immobile, the man slumps in a posture of hopelessness.
Although the woman in the picture reveals the requisite cover cleavage,
the man is not gazing at her but looking away with an expression of
blank despair. He holds a movie magazine containing dreams now
recognised as unobtainable. Its false images, we eventually discover, are
the cause of death by disillusionment.

            The ordinary man who has strayed into disaster, who is essentially

 

innocent or bemused or just thinking of something else (distracted by
love, or driven by sexual obsession) is one of the most familiar protago-
nists in film noir. Vulnerable, insecure, inept, he is acutely aware of being
in an inferior position, unable to assert his masculine authority or to
feel that he is in control of his fate. Whether he is up against a ruth-
lessly aggressive capitalist system or (as in the thrillers of Eric Ambler
and Graham Greene, for example) confronting violent political ideolo-
gies, the victim protagonist acts in desperation. Ill-equipped for such a
world, he feels trapped and doomed, filled with so many misgivings that
life seems an intolerable prison. James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, Eric
Knight (writing as Richard Hallas), Cornell Woolrich and Patrick Hamil-
ton all create characters who feel suicidal and may actually kill them-
selves or force others to kill them - and whereas murder, as Norman
Mailer writes in An American Dream, ‘has exhilaration within it’, suicide
‘is a lonely landscape with the pale light of a dream’.¹ ‘Victim noir’ nar-
ratives are amongst the most frequently analysed patterns in canonical
film noir. Dramatising the insecurity of normal existence, such narra-
tives are full of ‘wrong men’ pursued for crimes they did not commit;
men whose lives are subject to random reversals and who seem to be
the sport of a malign fate; men who may reveal latent criminal capac-
ities but who do not approach the status of competent criminals; weak
men worn down by the pressures of environment, floundering in a
world of corruption that they cannot quite grasp or betrayed by the
women who seem equally incomprehensible.² The solving investigator
and the heroic gangster, if sufficiently in the ascendancy, may carry a
narrative away from what one would strictly class as noir. The noir
victim, on the other hand, can be so far reduced to hopelessness and
fatalistic inertia that his narrative ceases to be recognisably a ‘thriller’.
McCoy’s I Should Have Stayed Home, James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce and,
in a later period, David Goodis’s The Blonde on the Street Corner are all
examples of this tendency.

It might be said that victim noir serves less often as a vehicle for spe-
cific socio-political criticisms of, for example, the criminality of the local
political machine or the gangsterism of the businessman. Since these
are largely narratives of individual struggles or sexual triangles, they
tend not to turn on the kind of direct confrontation with public wrong-
doing that is central to other forms of noir thriller. Nevertheless, they
function as some of the most powerful critiques of contemporary
society, using the weak protagonist either as a foil to corruption or as
the embodiment of pervasive enervation and moral or intellectual con-
fusion. As a foil, the protagonist functions rather in the way that the

satiric naïf does, his innocence or good nature throwing into relief the
brutality of the society that persecutes and destroys him. McCoy’s
novels provide the most obvious examples here. Even McCoy’s naive
victims, however, are not so innocent as to be morally blameless, and
in their encounters with harsh realities they reveal traits that can be
taken to represent more widespread tendencies towards self-deception,
loss of will, despondency and passivity. In contrast to the ‘stranger-
outcast’  figures  of  the  mid-century,  most  Depression  era  victim-
protagonists are not essentially isolated or different. Instead they are
‘like anyone else’, just trying to fulfil a modest dream of love or secu-
rity but finding circumstances such that (just as for the gangster pro-
tagonist) the action they hope will attain their objective is what
ultimately dooms them.

American dreams

California seemed the last hope for a place that might not be subject to
1930s forces of economic determinism. Nathaniel West, in Day of the
Locust (1939), describes Los Angeles as ‘the final dumping ground’, with
the Hollywood studio lot ‘in the form of a dream dump. . . . And the

dump grew continually, for there wasn’t a dream afloat somewhere
which wouldn’t sooner or later turn up on it . . .’ (99). The narrator of
Eric Knight’s parodic You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up (1938)
reminisces about his childhood belief that moving westward ‘over those
golden mountains’ would bring his family to the promised land. The
relatively little-known Knight produced only the one crime novel,
though he did subsequently make his mark by writing Lassie, Come
Home. But in the early thirties, when Knight came to write scripts in
Hollywood, two other prospective screenwriters also arrived whose
output was larger and whose influence was much greater: James M. Cain
and Horace McCoy. All three writers are preoccupied with California as
what Mike Davis in City of Quartz calls ‘the nightmare at the terminus
of American history’. Each in his way conveys something of the ‘new
vision of evil’ that in the 1930s ‘rushed in upon the American con-
sciousness’ in southern California, ‘a bad place - full of . . . victims of
America’.³ The first novels of Cain and McCoy, The Postman Always Rings
Twice (1934) and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935), can be seen as
the real starting place of the Los Angeles novel, the fictional under-
mining of a frontier myth in which California figures as the fabled land
of opportunity. In place of this myth, a new image emerges, with Cali-
fornia as the site of disappointment and failure, of disastrous endings

for rootless characters who arrive at a dead end of hopelessness.⁴ It is a
mood captured, for example, in Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1945 film, Detour, in
which the journey of Al Roberts (Tom Neal) across America to Los
Angeles leads only to murder, entrapment and despair. Sometimes - for
example, in Cain’s Double Indemnity (1936) and Serenade (1937) and in
a ‘non-California’ Cornell Woolrich novel, Black Path of Fear (1944) -
the need to escape or to continue their quest draws characters beyond
American borders, often south, to South America or Cuba, remote and
exotic locations that nevertheless turn out to offer no more liberating
a fresh start than does California.

James M. Cain and Horace McCoy were yoked together in Edmund
Wilson’s essay on the ‘boys in the back room’, which classed both of
them as ‘hard-boiled’. McCoy, in response, objected to the comparison
of his work to that of ‘the Cain school’, and there in fact seems little
likelihood that they influenced one another.⁵ It is possible that McCoy,
like Chandler, felt some distaste for, or at least wanted to dissociate
himself from, the shock value of novels like Cain’s, which were much
more open in their representation of sexuality than most other writers
of the time, Cain being in this respect more like post-1945 writers.⁶ Cain
offers compelling early versions of the femme fatale, most fully in
Double Indemnity. McCoy’s women, if sometimes fatal to themselves and
others, are never primarily important as objects of sexual obsession.
McCoy is clearly very much like Cain, however, in focusing social criti-
cism through individual tragedy, and also in writing genre novels that
modify and transcend the conventional form. Neither liked to be
labelled as hard-boiled,⁷  and both are in a sense straining away from
generic categorisation.

Dismissed as pulp novel hacks by many American critics of the time,
both Cain and McCoy were treated by European critics as the equals of
Hemingway and Faulkner. This European acclaim is in fact one of the
most important links between the two writers, both of whom were cited
as influences by French existentialists. Existentialism as a philosophical
movement only really became well known in America after the war,
when the writings of Sartre and Camus gained attention, but Cain and
McCoy seemed to European audiences to have anticipated absurdist
themes. They represented isolation, alienation, loneliness and dread.
They chose ‘insignificant’ protagonists under sentence of death, strug-
gling to make sense of a random and unstable world, epitomised in Los
Angeles, with its ‘population of strangers drifting about, surrendering
to heedless impulse’.⁸  The earliest screen adaptations of Cain’s novels
were in fact French, Camus cited Postman as an inspiration for L’Étranger

and McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, hailed as an American masterpiece, was circulated ‘among underground readers by the French literati’ before and during World War Two.⁹

McCoy, who started writing stories for Black Mask in 1927, was a con-
tributor  contemporary  with  Hammett,  Paul  Cain  and  Chandler.
He depicted decent, gullible, ineffectual protagonists, ill-equipped to
cope with the world. Firmly embedding his wider absurdist themes in
American life of the thirties, he was one of the crime writers to capture
most starkly the deprivation experienced in the years of the Great
Depression. Although his work is very unlike the gangster sagas of
Burnett, it has affinities with, for example, a narrative like High Sierra,
in which violent death constitutes a form of choice and freedom for a
protagonist who finally ‘crashes out’ of life when travel in the ‘hopeful’
westward direction is no longer possible, and in which the condemned
criminal is seen as far less brutal than those who organise so unjust a
society. The private, everyday world of McCoy’s novels is one in which
violence and corruption seem matter of course. He develops what is
essentially a radical, left-wing critique of American society, economic
injustice and (in No Pockets in a Shroud) native fascism, though without
developing any kind of overt, programmatic political position (in They
Shoot Horses, he actually edited out topical references).¹⁰ Like Hammett,
Anderson and the proletarian writers of the thirties, McCoy shows
clearly the socio-economic factors producing the world he describes. So,
for example, the dance marathon of They Shoot Horses can be seen as
having both ‘universal’ and historically specific meanings. It is an absur-
dist parable, a picture of a deadening and dehumanising contest so self-
enclosed and denatured that you are disqualified if you open a door to
the outside. With its circular movement, the marathon signifies that
‘There is no new experience in life’ (53). Futile repetition is interrupted
only by random violence, like the shooting that closes down the
marathon, or Gloria’s suicidal decision to ‘get off this merry-go-round’
(120). The novel is also, however, a protest against the casual vicious-
ness of the American economic and social system, and against the
pursuit by so many in the thirties of illusory goals, only to end by
having their fragile hopes (that they might, for example, be ‘discovered’
in Hollywood) worn away by weariness and defeat.

They Shoot Horses is framed by the death sentence passed on the pro-
tagonist, broken into sections that precede each chapter, with the type
becoming larger and larger as his final doom is read out. There is a sav-
agely ironic juxtaposition of the utterly cold, formal, deterministic
frame of the sentence with the puzzled, innocent first-person narrative

of how Robert Syverten actually came to shoot Gloria, his ‘very best
friend’, because she has asked him to kill her. The enclosing of the nar-
rative in the judicial death sentence sets up two discourses, with the
strong implication that the remorseless legal judgement omits all that
is humanly important and that the individual is punished for sins that
are the responsibility of society. There is no possible legal answer to the
question of ‘why sentence should not now be pronounced’, but the
human reasons are compelling, and the gap between these two dis-
courses constitutes the condemnation of official morality. Like Wille-
ford and Goodis later, McCoy uses the genre to censure a whole society.
His iconic figures are both victims, neither carrying guilt. The ‘femme
fatale’, Gloria, is guilty only of despair, a pathos-filled version of the
woman-as-temptress, tempting the narrator not to sex but to nihilism
and death. The ‘killer’, Robert, is touchingly bemused (‘I try to do
somebody a favour and I wind up getting myself killed’ [15]). In terms
of noir fatality, their narrative is doubly doomed. The opening phrase
of the legal pronouncement (‘The prisoner will stand’) starts a run-on
sentence that acts throughout as an increasingly insistent reminder
of the fate that awaits Robert. At the same time, there is a close-up
(everything ‘plain as day’) of the murder itself, with Gloria smiling
for ‘the first time’ when Robert is forced to agree that the only act of
friendship to someone in so alienated and friendless a state must be to
shoot them.

In I Should Have Stayed Home as well, the functioning of the judicial
system demonstrates official unwillingness to bring corruption to light
and the pervasive wrongness of the society (a judge, for example,
releases Mona, but only because he is running for re-election). Holly-
wood’s rich and powerful make the laws and own the courts and so
‘coerce and browbeat and violate all the laws . . .’ (96). The crushing cir-
cularity of the plot is established by the protagonist’s sense, at the end
as well at the beginning of the novel, that he cannot move on from the
level of Hollywood society signified by a modest rented bungalow in
the kind of neighbourhood where you lived ‘when you first started in
pictures’, hoping to gradually work your way ‘westward to Beverly Hills,
the Promised Land’ (8). On the opening page, Ralph Carston sits at
home, so afraid of what evils the sun will reveal to him that he waits
‘for the darkness’ (5). In the end, he lingers on in the same place, still
nursing vague hopes but no longer caring ‘what [the sun] would show
me’. Mona, the movie extra with whom he has shared his bungalow, is
convinced that there is ‘no escape’ and ‘proves it’ by marrying through
a Lonesome Hearts magazine, going back to what ‘she had desperately

tried to run away from’ (142). As in the earlier novel, suicidal im-
pulses are never far from the surface. In an unpublished version of the
novel,  McCoy  had  Ralph  Carston  kill  himself.¹¹ In  the  published

version, what remains is the suicide of Dorothy Trotter, who ‘never
would have stolen all that stuff if [she] could have got work in pictures’

(61). Her death represents for Mona and Ralph the destructiveness of a
system designed to generate illusions and feed dreams that cannot be
fulfilled. Mona props up movie magazines as ‘the instrument of death’
(98-100). Another of McCoy’s innocents abroad, the callow Ralph is
used to provide a perspective on ‘the most terrifying town in the world’,
though he is also culpable in his simple-mindedness. Altogether too
willing a victim of exploitation, he reflects, when he first accepts money
from the appalling Mrs Smithers, that with a 100 dollar bill in his pocket
he feels he is beginning to appreciate that ‘You had to kiss you-know-
whats . . . you have to play ball to get anywhere’ (33-4).

Published in the same year as McCoy’s I Should Have Stayed Home, You
Play the Black and the Red Comes Up is the only crime novel published
by ‘Richard Hallas’ - the pseudonym of Eric Knight, who was born in
England and only emigrated to the United States in his teens, and hence
was regarded by some critics as an ‘imitation’ hard-boiled writer. Knight
unquestionably used his tough-guy manner with at least some degree
of parodic intent, allowing the satiric impulses in the noir thriller to
come to the fore by caricaturing not just an absurdly corrupt and foolish
society but an absurdly unfortunate protagonist, whose ‘bad luck’ ironi-
cally consists in not having the bad luck he desires.¹²  Like Hammett’s
Dain Curse, Knight’s novel satirises form and content at the same time.
He mocks Hollywood endings and the darker ironies of noir but also
exposes the lunacies of southern Californian society and politics.¹³
‘Dick’ is the only name given to a protagonist who, though not par-
ticularly  bright,  possesses  a  kind  of  simple-minded  integrity.  The
deadpan voice of this ‘uninitiated’ narrator records all of the political
events of the novel with a kind of amused resignation to the ‘goofiness’
of everyone who has crossed the mountains into California. When the
audience for those spreading ‘the gospel of Ecanaanomics’ applauds
rather than giving Sister Patsy the horse laugh, he decides that they all
must be ‘so slap happy they couldn’t have told the difference between
Thursday and a fan dancer’ (65).

The flourishing of strange cults is just one manifestation of the fact
that California takes in its throngs of dust-bowl migrants (like Dick’s
father, who arrived from Oklahoma the year ‘everyone went broke’) and
offers them nothing more substantial than demented schemes and the

‘fake plot(s)’ of Hollywood films (8, 123-4). Dick’s own story seems set
to become grist to the Hollywood mill when he tells it to a movie direc-
tor, Quentin Genter, who retells it to another audience as a ‘tragedy’, a
piece of ‘stark Americana . . . raw and vital’, ‘brutal folklore’: ‘“It was
about a man, hungry, exhausted from lack of sleep, a magnificent
animal, puzzled and hurt by outrageous arrows of fortune . . . ”’ (54).
There is a kind of blackly comic excess about You Play the Black, espe-
cially in the last chapters, in which Dick, trying to lose his ‘guilty
money’, discovers that the usual gambler’s jinx, ‘you play the black and
the red comes up’, will not work for him when he wants to lose (31).
He then vainly tries to lose his life. Having escaped a death sentence for
killing by accident the woman he loves, he begs the system to condemn
him for various other transgressions but is ‘laughed out of court’:
‘“You’ve had your headlines, brother”’ (130). In Knight’s version of the
existential choice of death, it is life as adapted for Hollywood - ‘like a
Hays-office ending to a movie plot’ - that is the intolerable prison from
which the protagonist longs to escape, and ‘fatality’ is not dying but
remaining in it against his will.

The promised land is more obsessively sought in the novels of James

M. Cain. McCoy’s Robert Syverten, motivated by weariness and com-
passion, only kills Gloria on the spur of the moment. Knight’s narrator,
much too incompetent to  accomplish  the  murder  he  plans,  only
manages to kill inadvertently the woman who seemed to him to give
his life meaning. In Cain’s novels, on the other hand, the protagonists
do murder, not quite with professional proficiency but successfully and
with malice aforethought. In spite of this, his transgressors - bums,
drifters, seedy salesmen - are sympathetically drawn. Cain, who did not
write for Black Mask or the other crime pulps (publishing instead with
Knopf), described his novels not as genre fiction but as tragic depictions
of the ‘force of circumstance’ driving characters to commit some ‘dread-
ful act’.¹⁴  Although Cain does not offer sustained social criticism, the
Depression years are mentioned in passing or taken as given, a constant
determinant in characters’ actions and movements. The Postman Always
Rings Twice (1934) opens with Frank Chambers, who is bumming along
the California roads, thrown off of a hay truck he has sneaked a ride
on. In ‘Brush Fire’ (a short story of the mid-thirties) the young drifter
is paid for the ‘torture’ of fire fighting with the first money he has earned
for two years, after he had ‘begun this dreadful career of riding freights,
bumming meals, and sleeping in flop-houses’.¹⁵ Double Indemnity (1936),
in Cain’s words, ‘really belongs to the Depression’,¹⁶  as does Mildred
Pierce (1941), in which the iron resolution of Mildred is embodied by

her assertion that ‘“I can’t take things lying down, I don’t care if we’ve
got a Depression or not”’ (333). Cain presents his characters as victims
of a society traumatised by national economic disaster but nevertheless
driven by myths of limitless opportunity, success and unhampered self-
determination. They follow the ignis fatuus of the American dream, and
when they have (opportunistically) attained their wishes they find that
all they have really secured is defeat and entrapment. As Frank says to
Cora towards the end of Postman, ‘“We thought we were on top of a
mountain. That wasn’t it. It’s on top of us, and that’s where it’s been
ever since that night”’ (79).

Two years after the huge success of Postman, Cain sold to Liberty
magazine a serialisation of Double Indemnity, which is in many ways a
reworking of his earlier novel. A man falls for a strong, sexually knowing
woman. He plans, with her help, to kill her husband and, when the
murder has been accomplished, finds himself ensnared by a relation-
ship in which the bond of death has replaced that of sexual attraction.
This is a version of one of the most recognisable of film noir plots¹⁷ and,
as adapted for screen by Billy Wilder (1944), Double Indemnity became
one of the classics of the genre. Because Cain was writing for the family
magazine market, he was already working within the kind of restrictions
that shaped post-Code Hollywood films.¹⁸ This meant both that the sex
scenes in Double Indemnity were less steamy and brutal than those in
Postman and that the woman’s actions and motives in the murderous
affair were such that they could be more unequivocally censured. Rather
than being a sympathetic figure like Cora, Phyllis Nirdlinger is, as Walter
Huff is finally told, ‘“a pathological case. . . . The worse I ever heard

of”’ (316). She has not just killed Nirdlinger’s first wife but has also mur-
dered at least eight other people in her care while she was a nurse, some
of them in order to get their property, others just to ‘“cover up the trail
a little”’ (317). This element of melodramatic excess was removed in
Wilder’s film, in which Phyllis is only found to have murdered the first
wife. It is a change that simplifies and improves the plot but which, of
course, also has the effect of making the femme fatale even more cul-
pable, scheming, manipulative, not excused by madness and, as played
by Barbara Stanwyck, the first real example of ‘one of the enduring
archetypes of the American screen, the noir female’.¹⁹ As created by Cain,
however, Phyllis Nirdlinger becomes, in her deadly derangement, an
emblem of despair. Less touching than McCoy’s Gloria and not pre-
sented as a product of Depression deprivation, she is nonetheless a
pitiable figure, seeking her own destruction as well as symbolising
death’s inescapable presence at the end of the protagonist’s quest. Cain’s

novel, unlike the film, closes with Walter apparently having been given a chance to start again. He has a ticket on a steamer leaving for Balboa ‘and points south’. He discovers, however, that Phyllis is also on the cruise ship, smiling ‘the sweetest, saddest smile you ever saw’, preparing to meet her ‘bridegroom’ Death (322-3).

The ending of Wilder’s film, with Walter (Fred MacMurray) dying in
a scene that reaffirms his father-son bond with the chief claims inves-
tigator, Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), is generally regarded as neater and
more satisfactory than Cain’s own ending. This is a fair judgement,
though what Cain’s resolution does offer is an altogether darker and
more mocking image, ironically echoing the American dream of moving
on to a new life. Walter sits on the steamer, sliding by the coast of
Mexico, and, in the final twist of the plot, his feeling that he is not
‘going anywhere’ is confirmed by the realisation that he is accompanied
by  Phyllis,  an  intimate  of  Death  who  knows  with  certainty  that
‘“There’s nothing ahead of us”’ (322). The need for onward movement,
whether  to  find  escape  or  fulfilment,  makes  California  seem  the
promised land. It also motivates still more desperate searches beyond
American borders for some place not bound by the laws of harsh reality
and remorseless retribution. This is often, when westward movement
fails, ‘points south’. Occasionally film noir will offer its audience a
glimpse of the imagined idyll, such as the meeting in Peru at the
end of the film version of Dark Passage. More characteristically, though,
and obviously more noir, there are the conclusions in which destina-
tions beyond American borders are no more likely than California to
erase the past or to conform to the promises of the travel brochure.
When Frank Chambers sets out for South America with a puma trainer
(feeling free of Cora, ‘made of gas’ and able to ‘float off somewhere’) he
gets as far as Ensenada and then realises ‘that Nicaragua wouldn’t be
quite far enough’ (67-70); Walter and Phyllis are eaten by sharks off the
coast of Mexico; Johnny, in Cain’s Serenade (1937), finds Guatemala to
be indistinguishable from California, and the final return to Mexico
leads to Juana’s death and Johnny’s recognition that he will never sing
again.

Hollywood occupies a pivotal point in the structure of Serenade. The
setting is the world of music rather than film, but its function as an
embodiment  of  false  hopes  and  sordid  commercial  realities  is
unchanged. Even more explicitly than Cain’s earlier novels, Serenade is
a fable about capitalism and the corrupt exercise of financial power -
treating others as possessions, buying a voice or a person. Although the
role of Juana is very different from that of Phyllis, she, too, symbolises

a reality that undermines all transitory notions of success. Equated with
Earth and Mother, she is both dangerous and vital, a source of Johnny’s
power as a singer (142-3, 169, 195). Johnny’s voice is what he loses
when he sells himself, a loss literalised (he cannot sing any more) as a
central element in the narrative. From the outset his singing is associ-
ated with his male identity. When he is unable to sing, Juana laughs at
him and rejects him; when they come together on non-commercial
terms, he regains his voice, and with it his masculine competence. Ironi-
cally and inevitably, this competence restores his economic status and
the ‘power’ of his voice takes them back, disastrously, into the com-
mercial world, first to Hollywood, then to New York, where he becomes
even more ensnared by the commercial forces that assert ownership of
his voice. The most sinister embodiment of these forces is Winston
Hawes, who schemes to re-establish the economic (and sexual) control
that he once had over Johnny: Winston ‘didn’t care about art. . . . He

wanted to own it. Winston was that way about music. He made a whore
out of it.’ There is obviously a sense in which Johnny’s artistic sterility
is caused by his latent homosexuality, but the nature of the relation-
ship with Winston is also, and equally, characterised by its economic
nature. Ownership by an older man who makes a whore of your music
is presented as analogous to the ownership of Juana by the politico from
whom Johnny has earlier saved her. In the end, as the narrative circles
back to Guatemala and Mexico, both Juana and Johnny are defeated by
the world they have tried to defy.

Such circular, aspiration-defeating tales of victimisation by the rich
and powerful need not, of course, revolve around Hollywood. Cornell
Woolrich, for example, in the fifth of his ‘black’ novels, The Black Path
of Fear (1944),²⁰ creates a sexual triangle similar to those in Cain’s early
novels, with an older, wealthier man, a discontented wife and an insuf-
ficiently cautious lover. Here, however, the centre of power is Miami
and the escape route leads to Havana, which turns out, like Cain’s South
American destinations, to be not quite far enough for freedom. It is still
a place in which the pursuer can accomplish his vindictive ends by
remote control, a place as close to death as anywhere else. The over-
powering feelings of dread and entrapment are characteristic of Wool-
rich, who more than any single writer created the atmosphere that is
associated with canonical films noirs, several of which were based on
Woolrich novels and stories.²¹ The ‘path of fear’ is one that turns back
on itself, eventually drawing the protagonist, Bill Scott, to return to
Miami, where he is at the outset, only now knowingly walking towards
death, his cold-blooded revenge, rather than love. The established male

power, Eddie Roman, a vicious night-club owner and drug dealer,
had viewed his wife, Eve, as a commodity, and speedily arranged her
death and the framing of Scott when the lovers ran off. There are limits,
however, to the power of his wealth. Though Roman in the end
offers Scott his entire fortune, it does not enable him to buy his own
survival,  any  more  than  he  can  accomplish  the  resurrection  of
Eve: ‘“All I want [Scott says] is just Eve. Just arrange to have her brought
back. . . . That should be easy for a guy like you, used to pulling
wires”’ (148).

European nightmares

Two images dominate the end of Black Path of Fear: the journey that for
Bill Scott ends as it began, in an encounter with violent death; and the
walls built around Roman’s Miami house, which ‘hadn’t been good
enough to keep death out’ (152-4). Roman cowers in his estate because
he is a gangster gone soft (decidedly ‘un-Roman’), but the walled sanc-
tuary is perhaps more often associated with the innocent victim, the
man who, in order to avoid death, is forced to venture out and con-
front aggressors on their own terms. As W. M. Frohock argues in The
Novel of Violence in America, ‘the novel of destiny’ (his label for the kind
of novel in which the predicament of the hero can only be resolved by
violence, which in turn brings his own destruction) was more charac-
teristic of American than other writers, and England ‘did not follow suit’
in the sense of producing novels as saturated with violence as the tough
thrillers of the American thirties.²²

In their own way, however, English writers were preoccupied with the
question of whether ‘violence is man’s fate’. As I argued in the previous
chapter, with the rise of continental fascism in the thirties, writers of
the ‘serious’ British thriller increasingly turned their attention to vio-
lence. They used the gangster as an embodiment of alien aggression,
but more often they centred their plots on the dilemmas of the pro-
tagonist who seems to be left no option other than violent action. In
such novels, violence is often figured as the terminus of a journey or as
a response to violation of boundaries that turn out not to have been
‘good enough to keep death out’. In one of the more memorable crime
novels of the period, Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square (1942), the
boundaries are internal. The apparently civilised man’s relationship to
violence is imaged as a psychic split, with repressed violence surfacing
at a terrible cost. The thrillers of Graham Greene and Eric Ambler also
locate in their British characters a long-suppressed capacity for violent

action, but the internal struggles of their protagonists are only part of
the story.²³  The action in their novels is always precipitated by ‘the
other’, most commonly the representative of fascist aggression. Violence
is a foreign menace, intercepting the protagonist on his journey or
invading his sanctuary, Britain itself - the fortified estate that turns out
to be all too vulnerable.

There are, as Chapter 2 points out, elements within some American
thrillers of the thirties (Burnett’s Nobody Lives Forever, for example) that
hint at links between European fascism, or native American manifesta-
tions of fascist tendencies, and the thuggery of American gangsterism.
Horace McCoy also responded very directly to fascist violence in his
1937 novel, No Pockets in a Shroud. This was a novel for which he did
not succeed in finding an American publisher until 1948, and even then
in so altered a version that the political dynamic was wholly trans-
formed, with its passionately left-wing heroine changed from a Com-
munist to a sexual pervert. Its 1937 publication, only somewhat altered,
was in fact in London (by Arthur Barker), and in Europe this novel was
more widely translated and better known than any of McCoy’s other
fiction.²⁴  In comparison to the defeated victim-protagonists of other
thirties novels, McCoy’s protagonist, the crusading journalist Michael
Dolan, is assertive and effective, exposing the corruption of the ‘politi-
cal high-binders . . . the big-time thieves’ (9). In some ways he is heir to
the radical principles and indignation of such early twentieth-century
naturalistic novels as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906). Dolan’s sense
of political purpose and his determined integrity make this a less whole-
heartedly pessimistic novel than They Shoot Horses and I Should Have
Stayed Home, but he is up against forces of oppression in comparison to
which he is weak and doomed.

Resembling less the tough private eye or successful gangster than
British protagonists of the thirties thriller, Dolan is principled but ill-
suited to a confrontation with armed brutality. Placed, like Hammett’s
Op, in a representative city, ‘typical and symbolic of the whole rotten
mess’, he tackles a range of corruption, most daringly a fascist, Klan-
like,  secret  political  organisation (125-30),  entering  their  territory

dressed as they are, suffering a savage beating and ultimately murdered
for having ‘blasted this town wide open’ (170). Like the unwilling pro-
tagonists of the British thrillers of the period, Dolan is confronted with
a choice between withdrawal and resistance, and must suppress the
‘panicky and helpless’ (11) feeling that only retreat is sensible. Through-
out the novel, there are explicit comparisons between the strong-arm
bullying of the corrupt American men of power and Hitler or Mussolini,

together with the heavy ironising of the ‘wonderful paradise’ of the
United States, where ‘a man can say what he pleases . . . the hell he can’
(90-1). Dolan denies that he is a Communist (or ‘If I am, I don’t know
it’ [162]) but in determining to fight the Crusaders he has woken up to
a sense of purpose, sustained in the face of his certain knowledge that
his actions will not only be unrewarded but fatal: ‘there’s no pockets in
a shroud’ (132).

In Britain in the late thirties and early forties, writers like Eric Ambler,
Graham Greene and Patrick Hamilton repeatedly explored the question
of how a man who is by nature civilised, cautious and restrained is to
respond to violent political forces that threaten to plunge civilisation
into barbarism. For writers who felt that they were much more imme-
diately confronting the possibility of another war, there was even more
at stake than there was for a man like Dolan, wavering between pru-
dence and dangerous journalistic boldness. Dolan briefly experiences
what it is to become ‘indistinguishable’ from his enemies when he dis-
guises himself to attend their meeting. For British writers, there was a
fear of becoming like the enemies in a far more thoroughgoing way,
that is, of becoming brutal in order to oppose brutality. The memory of
the horrors of World War One had reinforced pacifist feeling in Britain
and strengthened the determination to stay out of continental political
conflicts, dominated by what seemed to most Britons to be utterly alien
political ideologies. Orwell, in ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’, argued
that ‘the sheltered conditions of English life’ had led many liberal
humanists to dissociate themselves to the point of incomprehension
from the repellent, ‘anachronistic’ emotions aroused by fascist mili-
tarism. This made it difficult for them to come to terms with the fact
that, to stand against Hitler, it was necessary to bring into being ‘a
dynamic not necessarily the same as that of the Nazis, but probably
quite as unacceptable to ‘“enlightened” . . . people’.²⁵  Forster, in ‘The
1939 State’, described the same ‘hideous dilemma’, which left ‘intelli-
gent and sensitive people’ torn by ‘messages from contradictory worlds,
so that whatever they do appears to them a betrayal of something
good’.²⁶

This dilemma, Forster suggested, produced a kind of paralysis, and the
thrillers of the period repeatedly create characters who suffer from a
sense of immobilising contradiction. An unwilling protagonist hesitates
to act lest he lose his own humanity and take on the qualities of his
opponents. In order to defend his cherished culture and core of values,
he must cross the boundary between innocence and guilt, risking sepa-
ration from the culture he is trying to protect: ‘It was extraordinary

how the whole world could alter after a single violent action’ (Confi-
dential Agent, 121). In both its structure and its imagery, the British
thriller of the thirties expresses this sense of being divided from oneself,
of paradoxically becoming what one is not. Whereas Dolan arrives at
his crucial decision to risk journalistic aggression in the early pages of
McCoy’s novel, the British thriller often involves its protagonist in pro-
longed hesitation, a deferral of violent response until no other option
remains. Like the victim-protagonists in the American thriller, these are
figures who never really achieve competence, who may finally act in
desperation but who are always at a disadvantage compared to the world
of ‘real’ violence.

Eric Ambler’s prewar thrillers are on the whole too optimistic to be
classed as noir. In the novels written before 1940, armaments them-
selves tend to be viewed as the cause of conflict, and his plot resolu-
tions accordingly offer salvation in the form of conflict averted, with
war becoming less likely as a result of the dismantling of weapons of
destruction. The protagonists of novels such as Uncommon Danger (1937)
and Cause for Alarm (1938), generally ineffectual innocents, struggle to
comprehend the world of violent action, and very reluctantly move
from detachment to involvement during the course of the narrative.
Kenton (Uncommon Danger) and Marlow (Cause for Alarm), like McCoy’s
Dolan, have their resolution strengthened by the alliances they form
with a sympathetic Communist. In both novels, this is the Russian
agent Zaleshoff, whose idealistic left-wing views are tacitly supported by
plots that move towards the possibility of utopian transformation, of
fascism thwarted, not without toughness, but without recourse to bru-
talising violence.

Ambler only created a noir version of this basic plot pattern when the
avoidance of war had ceased to be a possibility. Journey into Fear (1940)
was the first Ambler novel adapted as a film noir, if a somewhat mar-
ginal noir, in which a less isolated protagonist moves towards a more
reassuring resolution than Ambler himself supplies.²⁷  The last novel
Ambler published before himself joining the army, Journey into Fear
propels its ill-equipped engineer-hero, Graham, into an irretrievably
dark and violent world, awaiting ‘a bloody spring’ (10). The novel is set
on board a ship from which the protagonist cannot escape, a miniature
of the looming European conflict. Unsupported by a competent Com-
munist ally, Graham has to come to terms with the fact that his only
option is armed combat. His survival on board the ship (which is car-
rying him home to assist in the work of re-equipping the Turkish navy)
depends on his willingness and ability to handle a gun. He is completely

cut off from all of the props of normal life: wife, home and friends ‘had
ceased to exist. He was a man alone, transported into a strange land
with death for its frontiers’ (132). Without a revolver, he would be ‘as
defenceless as a tethered goat in the jungle’ (59). The journey, meant to
carry him back to civilisation, has ironically carried him into a regres-
sive world of primitive animal violence and to avoid his own destruc-
tion Graham has to throw civilised restraint aside. At the climax of the
novel he unleashes his own aggressive impulses in a blind fury. He does
emerge alive from his ordeal, but he has unequivocally crossed the
border between peace and war: ‘life was never going to be quite the
same again’ (23).

The thrillers that Graham Greene wrote during the late thirties and
early forties are more uniformly pessimistic than those of Ambler. The
left-wing grounds for hope that underpin the optimism of Ambler’s
thirties thrillers are absent in the novels of Greene, whose tendency is
always to subvert the distinctions of political rhetoric. Like Ambler,
Greene develops his novels around the theme of lost innocence, but in
his work innocence is most often blighted from the start, and there is
no innocent or ideal future to be conjured from ‘what we are’.²⁸ As war
approached, Greene’s response to the political conflicts of the time
became increasingly direct, moving away from his tendency, evident in
Brighton Rock (1938), for example, to think in terms of eternal rather
than merely national salvation. In Confidential Agent (1939), written
after the Munich Agreement, when ‘trenches were being dug on London
commons’ and the approach of war seemed certain,²⁹ and in Ministry of
Fear (1943), written in the midst of war, he is preoccupied with the
unequal contest between fascist violence and an opponent weakened
by civilised scruples.

In Confidential Agent, Greene creates in ‘D’ a protagonist who, though
nominally a Spanish agent caught up in the animosities and betrayals
of the Spanish Civil War, embodies the very ‘English’ qualities that also
mark out Ambler’s protagonists. He is a gentle and civilised man ‘pushed
around’ by the pressures of political violence, his humanistic responses
(compassion, basic decency, a preference for non-violence) invested
with a fundamental sense of rightness, in spite of which he seems
doomed to defeat. The dilemmas faced by the principled man as he
moves from impotent passivity to reluctant aggression are central to
Greene’s theme. D’s initiation into violence had taken place when he
was buried alive in a cellar, an experience of total powerlessness which
permanently altered his sense of the probable and the permissible: ‘you
couldn’t be buried in a bombed house for fifty-six hours and emerge

incredulous of violence’ (32). Eventually, D and his companion, Rose
Cullen, feel themselves propelled into a repugnant course of action, a
revolt against the ‘passive past’ requiring ‘a violence which didn’t

belong to them’ (145). As in Ambler, the decision not to be passive
marks a turning point in the plot, reversing the direction of the pursuit.
Going on the offensive means a complete break with the graspable order
of a passive past: ‘the blind shot . . . in the bathroom of a strange
woman’s basement flat. How was it possible for anyone to plan his life
or regard the future with anything but apprehension?’ (156). Though
the context of war of course transforms its legal-political meaning, such
an action, like the shot the narrator fires in McCoy’s They Shoot Horses,
signifies an irreversible self-transformation. It is also a violation of the
calm stability that Greene associates with peacetime England. As in his
earlier novels, Greene both ironises and views nostalgically the English
sense of immunity from violence. Running like a refrain through the
novel are phrases suggesting that in England violence seems tasteless
and improbable. When a young girl who has helped D is murdered, he
thinks of her as having become ‘by the act of death . . . naturalised in
his own land. . . . His territory was death’ (128). The journeys by ship at

the beginning and end of Confidential Agent reinforce our sense of
Britain’s actual vulnerability, an island that is like a frail fortress sur-
rounded by death. In D’s hesitant confrontation with danger and in his
final defeat, Greene encapsulates British anxiety on the eve of war. His
mission having failed, D is ‘powerless’ in more than one sense: he
returns home without the power (coal) essential for his side to continue,
and we know that his own half-hearted aggression will give him a poor
chance of survival.

Greene’s last novel of the war years, Ministry of Fear, is his most search-
ing representation of the emergence of the ordinary individual into a
world in which violence seems inescapable. The protagonist, Arthur
Rowe, is not ‘innocent’ (he is technically guilty of the mercy killing of
his sick wife). He is already isolated from ordinary society and feels
himself ‘an exile’ from ‘the old peaceful places’ (47). The function of
his earlier crime, however, is to establish a central contrast between, on
the one hand, a regretful involvement in violence, motivated by love
and mindful of suffering, and, on the other, the malignant aggression
associated with fascism. Britain’s involvement in the war is figured in
Rowe’s anxiety over what he had, after all, done for the best of motives.
The unsuspecting Rowe must undergo further transformations as he is
drawn into this darker world of political violence. The first crucial trans-

formation takes place when he agrees to deliver a suitcase to a room in
a hotel in which you can lose yourself - a labyrinthine wilderness of
darkness and danger in the heart of London. The blast from a bomb in
the suitcase leaves Rowe with amnesia and a new identity, recovering
in a shell-shock clinic which restrains all violence, taking it to be a form
of madness. In the ‘madhouse’ of Europe, the clinic seems to be an
‘arcady’ in which Rowe feels the inexplicable happiness of someone
‘relieved suddenly of some terrible responsibility’ (111). Paradoxically,
however, this state of regression is also one in which Rowe is able, with
the romantic exhilaration of the boyhood state of mind that seems
most real to him, to act in an uncharacteristically vigorous way. When
his personality is finally, at the end of the novel, reintegrated, his
new ‘wholeness’ contains the tensions and contradictions of English
involvement in violence. Like Graham at the end of Journey into
Fear, he feels that he is returning to a home that is irretrievably altered:
it was impossible to retreat, closing the door ‘as if one has never
been away’. He is at war and, knowing not to expect peace, he has joined
the ‘permanent staff’ of the ‘Ministry of Fear’. More forcefully than
any other British thriller of the period, Ministry of Fear expresses the
anxiety  that  the  recourse  to  violence  will  in  itself ‘ruin’  what  is

defended. Earlier, when Rowe contemplates London in ruins, he says that what frightens him is ‘how I came to terms with it before my memory went . . . God knows what kind of ruin I am myself. Perhaps I am a murderer?’ (163).

In contrast to Ambler and Greene, Patrick Hamilton uses a much more
inward domestic drama to express the confrontation of the ordinary
English self with an ‘other self’ that is all too familiar with emptiness,
meaninglessness  and  impending  violence.  Hamilton’s  best-known
novel, Hangover Square, represents the almost unbridgeable gap between
civilised man and destructive man as a case study in schizophrenia. His
protagonist, George Bone, is the very type of the victim-transgressor.
His lapses from his socially constructed self into his ‘insane’ other self
resemble the liminal experiences of Greene and Ambler protagonists:
men cross over into a zone in which normal civilised inhibitions no
longer apply. The zone of danger, with which both gangsters and private
eyes are thoroughly acquainted, is the ‘other side’ of a boundary demar-
cating a world in which violent, unexpected things routinely happen,
in which beams fall and any ‘softness’, whether on the part of a Sam
Spade or a Rico, puts one’s life in jeopardy. Bone is established as
someone who has been ‘a noticeably uncruel boy in that cruel and

resounding atmosphere’ of his school days (96-7), alienated from the
outset, persecuted for his ‘dotty’ moods, but a wholly ‘human’ and sym-
pathetic figure - touching, simple, direct, vulnerable (99). Even in his
‘normal’ state Bone is an outsider, though one who pathetically tries to
fit in and follow the rituals of the world into which he is drawn by his
obsession with one of noir’s most completely disagreeable femmes
fatales, the ‘loathsome’ Netta (79). Bone’s murderous response is in a
sense not just to Netta, with whom he decides he is ‘in hate’ (29), or to
‘Darkest Earl’s Court in the Year 1939’ (Hamilton’s subtitle: the novel
begins in December 1938) but to the viciousness, nastiness and point-
lessness of the whole of the prewar world. Bone’s private hell is seen in
relation to the post-Munich period of suspense about whether there will
be a war, with Bone reflecting that a war is perhaps what he’s waiting
for, to ‘put a stop to it all’ (31). Part of the atmosphere of the time that
Hamilton creates is to do with the belief that the peace would never
break and the bombs never fall (101). Bone’s ‘shilly-shallying’ (169)
about killing Netta and Peter is, like the delays and evasions in Greene,
an image of the state of mind of decent, kindly Britain in the aftermath
of Munich.

There are also, however, forces of evil within Britain itself. The vio-
lence of the social world to which the gentle Bone belongs is seen very
clearly, for example, by Bone’s old friend Johnnie, to whom the fascist
Peter is ‘a scornful, ultra-masculine man’ with a cruel face who singles
himself out by wearing a kind of ‘uniform’, and Netta is someone who
wears her attractiveness ‘as a murderous utensil’ (104, 124, 127). The
alliance between Netta and Peter is explicitly analysed in terms of a
blend of social snobbery and ‘blood, cruelty, and fascism’, not an ideo-
logical commitment but a ‘feeling for violence and brutality’, for ‘the
pageant and panorama of fascism’ (128-31). Bone’s eventual act of
murder coincides more or less exactly with the outbreak of war: it is 3
September 1939 when he finally puts his own plan into motion. He goes
through his task with conscientious thoroughness, but afterwards, in
Maidenhead, realises that if he were to wake from his dream state and
look back on events of the morning he would ‘be faced with some
inconceivable horror of the mind such as he could not bear’ (278), such
as war is for a previously secure England. The symbolic function of
Maidenhead is similar to that of the mythic simplicity of the American
farm or small town. As Bone’s imagined final destination all through
the novel, it is associated with childhood and innocence and is, of
course, fated to disappoint his expectations. There is no return to inno-
cence or release from the sadness and incomprehensibility of existence,

so for someone as ingenuous as Bone, death is the only option. The ‘virginal’ state symbolised by Maidenhead turns out to be ‘no good at all’, and probably never was: ‘It wasn’t, and never could be, the peace, Ellen, the river, the quiet glass of beer, the white flannels, the ripples of the water.’ Bone was ‘wrong about Maidenhead’ (278-80).