The Noir thriller ----Page 5

The years immediately following the end of World War Two marked the
start of a crucial phase in the creation, definition and popularising of
both literary and cinematic noir. There were several concurrent de-
velopments: the Hollywood production of a growing number of pes-
simistic, downbeat crime films, the postwar release in Europe of a large
backlog of American films, the publication in France of a new series of
crime novels and the appearance in America of a new kind of book, the
paperback original. Films released in America just before the end of the
war, such as Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and Edward Dmytryk’s
Murder, My Sweet (both 1944), were taken as evidence, when they
appeared in France, that ‘the Americans are making dark films too’.¹ In
1945, under the editorship of Marcel Duhamel, Gallimard started pub-
lishing its translations of British and American crime novels in the Série
Noire. In 1946, echoing the Gallimard label, the French critics Nino
Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier wrote the two earliest essays to identify
a departure in film-making, the American ‘film noir’. Although they were
not thought of in the United States as films noirs (the French label did
not become widely known there until the 1970s), numerous postwar
Hollywood movies seemed to confirm the French judgement that a new
type of American film had emerged, very different from the usual studio
product and capable of conveying an impression ‘of certain disagree-
able realities that do in truth exist’.²

The Hollywood releases of 1945 included Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour,
Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce and three films noirs directed by Fritz Lang

- Ministry of Fear, Scarlet Street and The Woman in the Window. In 1946
David Goodis published the first of his crime novels, Dark Passage, and
Delmer Daves began filming it; in the spring and summer months of
1946 alone, Hollywood released Blue Dahlia (George Marshall), Dark
Corner (Henry Hathaway), The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett),
Gilda (Charles Vidor), The Killers (Robert Siodmak) and The Big Sleep
(Howard Hawks). In the same year Gallimard brought out French trans-
lations of two of Horace McCoy’s novels, the first American novels to
be included in the Série Noire.

American publishing was itself being transformed by the introduction
of the paperback. By 1946 there were over 350 softcover titles in print
(three times as many as in 1945), with Pocket Books, Avon, Popular
Library, Dell and Bantam all publishing in the paperback format and
replacing the pulp magazines on the news-stands.³  Several of the best
postwar crime novelists (Goodis, Jim Thompson, John D. MacDonald,
Mickey Spillane, Charles Williams, Gil Brewer) were about to begin

writing paperback originals, though, as is usual in noir narratives, some
of the characters were confronted with failure and many were in the
dark about what others were doing. Thompson, who was spending
much of his time drinking and doing odd jobs, was as yet unsuccessful
in establishing himself as a crime writer. He had started writing his first
crime novel in 1932 but it was only in 1949, after 17 years of ‘fighting
that book’, that Nothing More Than Murder was finally published in hard-
cover by Harper’s.⁴ Spillane was living in a tent and trying to build his
own house. Needing 1000 dollars for the materials, he wrote I, the Jury,
which only sold about 7000 copies in hardcover but, as a Signet paper-
back, sold over 2 million copies in two years,⁵ an achievement that ‘elec-
trified and inspired the softcover book industry’.⁶ Gold Medal saw the
possibility of publishing paperback originals, and they were soon pro-
viding an entirely new kind of market for crime writers, whose work
could now for the first time go directly into cheap softcover editions.
MacDonald, Williams and Brewer, none of whom had previously pub-
lished novels, all began to write for Gold Medal in 1950-1. Goodis, after
the success of Dark Passage, had a brief career as a Hollywood script
writer, and when this collapsed at the end of the forties he retreated to
his home town of Philadelphia and started writing his bleak paperback
originals, the first of which, Cassidy’s Girl, was a best-seller for Gold
Medal in 1951. Thompson’s first paperback original, The Killer Inside Me,
was published in 1952 by a competing house, Lion Books, ‘the most off-
beat of paperback imprints’.⁷  As the boom grew, the struggling, often
isolated crime writers fed both the ‘gloriously subversive era’⁸ of Ameri-
can paperback publishing and a burgeoning output from Hollywood of
films that would in due course be grouped together under the name
French critics had given them: as Nino Frank described them, ‘. . . these
“dark” films, these films noirs, [which] no longer have anything in
common with the ordinary run of detective movies . . .’.⁹

Nino Frank’s article reflects the difficulty of finding a suitable label
for these ‘dark films’. The films he is discussing, he writes, all ‘belong
to what used to be called the detective film genre, but which would now
be better termed the crime adventure, or, even better yet, the crime psy-
chology film’.¹⁰ American film critics, without a unifying term at their
disposal, settled for such phrases as ‘murder melodrama’, or ‘brass-
knuckled thriller’ or ‘hard-boiled, kick-em-in-the-teeth murder cycle’.¹¹
The search for a satisfactory description itself gives some indication of
the diversity of noir. Both French and American critics emphasised the
indebtedness of these films to hard-boiled investigative novels, which

provided the basis for some of the most memorable of early films noirs:
Hammett’s Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key had both been adapted in
the early 1940s; Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, The Big Sleep and Lady
in the Lake were all adapted in the mid-1940s, and Bogart’s performances
as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and as Marlowe in The Big Sleep estab-
lished him as the iconic private eye. Revisions of the detective story
were, however, only one element in the phenomenon, and Bogart’s
place as ‘a key iconographic figure in all of film noir’¹² was secured by
the fact that he was cast, as well, in a range of non-investigative films
noirs, such as High Sierra (1941), Dark Passage (1946) and In a Lonely Place
(1950). These films were based, respectively, on novels by W. R. Burnett,
David Goodis and Dorothy B. Hughes, and Bogart’s roles in them
suggest the different forms noir took as it developed during the forties.
In addition to the weary integrity of the private eye, there was the
pathos of the ageing gangster (Roy ‘Mad Dog’ Earle in High Sierra), the
desperation of the ‘wrong man’ (the escaped convict wrongly accused
of his wife’s murder in Dark Passage) and the violence of the suspected
psychopath (the self-destructive writer in In a Lonely Place).

In creating film noir, Hollywood drew on the work of a wide range
both of earlier writers and of the late forties-early fifties crime novelists
who were writing crime fiction that very often had no role for the
private eye. Amongst those whose work was adapted during this period,
along  with  Burnett,  Goodis  and  Hughes,  were  William  Lindsay
Gresham, Horace McCoy and William P. McGivern, all of whom pro-
duced  novels  that  had  as  their  protagonists  violent,  self-deceived
men, criminals, crooked cops, killers, psychotics. Cornell Woolrich was
another of the writers whose work, very different in style from the hard-
boiled tradition, became closely identified with the noir sense of help-
lessness and paranoia. Between 1942 and 1949, there were 11 Woolrich
novels or stories made into films, the protagonists of which include a
man hypnotised into thinking he is a murderer (Fear in the Night) and
a mind-reader who predicts his own death (Night Has a Thousand Eyes),
as well as alcoholics, amnesiacs, hunted men and fall guys. Private eye
films continued, of course, to be made, but if investigative figures were
included, they tended to become increasingly vulnerable and flawed -
for  example,  Bogart’s  confused,  hunted  Rip  Murdoch  in  John
Cromwell’s Dead Reckoning (1947), Robert Mitchum as the traumatised
Jeff Markham in Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947), Edmund
O’Brien as the dying protagonist hunting his own killers in Rudolph
Maté’s D.O.A. (1950).¹³

Many of the writers whose work was adapted by the Hollywood

studios  were  also  translated  for  Gallimard’s  Série  Noire:  Chandler,
Hammett, Burnett, McGivern and Goodis were all added to Duhamel’s
list between 1948 and 1953. He included many of the American writers
whose work was central to the development of paperback crime writing
from the 1950s on. So, for example, in addition to Goodis, he published
Jim Thompson, John D. MacDonald, Gil Brewer, Harry Whittington,
Charles Williams and Lionel White. If, however, one wants to arrive at
a coherent definition of literary noir, it would have to be said that a full
list of the novels Duhamel chose for his Série Noire would not be the
best basis. Amongst the huge number of Série Noire offerings (getting
on for 300 American, British and French crime novels in the first ten
years alone) many would be unlikely to be included in any late twen-
tieth-century reprinting of classic romans noirs. This is particularly true
of the sizeable number of French and British imitations of the Ameri-
can style, which were generally published under assumed names that
were meant to sound more American.¹⁴  British thrillers were mainly
represented by the novels of Peter Cheyney and James Hadley Chase.
The latter wrote several satisfyingly noir novels, for example Eve and
More Deadly Than the Male, both in the mid-forties.¹⁵ Cheyney, however,
is a prime example of the tone of light-hearted hard-boiled pastiche
that often found its way into imitation American thrillers. He created
pacy and violent novels that are exaggerated, present-tense versions
of the stories produced by such Black Mask writers as Carroll John
Daly. Cheyney’s Lemmy Caution is an American G-man who first
appeared in novels like Dames Don’t Care (1937), Can Ladies Kill? (1938)
and You’d Be Surprised (1940). Caution’s style and character can perhaps
be gauged from his banter on the last page of Dames Don’t Care: ‘“Listen
lady,” I tell her . . . “I am one tough guy. I am not the sorta guy who
you can trust around the place havin’ breakfast with a swell dame like
you. Especially if you are good at makin’ waffles”’ (192). As the upbeat
comic tone here suggests, the Caution novels are imitation hard-boiled
without being noir, exemplifying, especially in the French film versions,
the parodic impulse that is never far from the idea of the tough-guy
investigator.¹⁶

The defining characteristics of the American roman noir and film noir
can more easily be deduced from French critical discourse, which was
in general less focused on what was, by the fifties, the fading role of the
investigator than on the other narrative patterns that were becoming
increasingly dominant, in which morally ambivalent victims and crim-
inals served as centres of consciousness. The French admiration for such
interwar writers as Horace McCoy and James M. Cain continued to be

apparent in the postwar period, particularly amongst French existen-
tialists, who responded to the protoabsurdist qualities of the earlier
American thrillers. As Naremore writes, both before and after the war,
‘when the French themselves were entrapped by history’, critics influ-
enced by existentialism were attracted to film noir ‘because it depicted
a world of obsessive return, dark corners, or huis-clos’.¹⁷ The crises that
had shaken France since the 1930s - the period of war, occupation, resis-
tance and collaboration described by the French as ‘les années noires’ -
led many to share the existentialist preoccupations, and to appreciate
the darker strains in recent American literature and film.

The Americans, for their part, were increasingly absorbing European
intellectual influences. In the postwar years, the work of the French exis-
tentialists became more widely known in the United States as a response
to the absurdity of modern life and an articulation of the need for exis-
tential self-definition: ‘Auden [Age of Anxiety] was not alone in seeing
wartime and postwar America as a place where the existential anxieties
of modern Europe found a second home.’¹⁸ The existentialist novels of
Sartre and Camus, La Nausée and L’Étranger, were gaining an American
audience, and mainstream American writers were beginning to express
a sharper sense of distance between self and community. They evoked
feelings of estrangement, displacement and dislocation with their rep-
resentations of fearful, isolated anti-heroes, such as the rebels and
victims of writers like Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Richard Wright
and Ralph Ellison. Existentialism had a particularly strong appeal for
black American writers like Wright and Chester Himes,¹⁹ for whom exis-
tentialist themes seemed closely allied to the expression of a racially
derived sense of alienation and of the outsider’s need to become visible
and assert his own reality.

In the United States, the postwar years were, of course, a time of pros-
perity. The economy continued to expand and the country established
both its military and economic power, with real incomes soon doubling.
Unprecedented affluence made it seem that the Depression had been a
historical aberration.²⁰ Increased affluence, however, was accompanied
by materialism and conformity to an ideal embodied in the family
home, the ‘site of integration into the cultural order’.²¹ This was a period
in which many felt that the individual was powerless against the large-
scale forces of industrial and technological mass society, and during
which the pressures towards conformity were heightened by a national
mood of self-righteous aggressiveness, directed not just against com-
munism abroad but against those at home who were regarded as sedi-
tious or subversive of ‘the American way’. Cold War apprehensions and

suspicions and McCarthyite witch-hunts helped create the atmosphere of fear and paranoia that is so strongly present in both the cinematic and the literary noir of the fifties.²²

The representation of postwar America as a ‘consensus society’ has
been challenged in recent years by those who argue that the domestic
scene, both during and after World War Two, was ‘a site of disagree-
ments, of oppressions, and, often, of the careful and carefully hidden
deployment of new modes of power and power-alliances’.²³ Literary noir
develops its own narratives of disagreement and its exposures of oppres-
sion, debunking the dominant myth of a unified, happily conformist
America. Liberal critics of the time often focused on the ways in which
American society hunted out difference and suppressed and margin-
alised dissent. They were concerned with explaining a postwar malaise
characterised by caution, repression and intellectual retreat.²⁴  These
preoccupations can be seen in the work of the many critics who were
beginning to assail the conformist ethos. Norman Mailer, for example,
attacked what he saw as a new totalitarianism in a culture that stifled
dissent, and Irving Howe, in an essay called ‘The Age of Conformity’,
complained that the nation’s intellectuals were becoming moderate and
‘tame’.²⁵  Sociological analysis which flourished in the late fifties and
early sixties, like that of David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd (1950),
identified the bland ‘other-directed’ character type that seemed to be
emerging in America’s affluent consumer culture.²⁶ Much other analy-
sis focused on the problems of consent and conformity, on the nega-
tive effects of private affluence (J. K. Galbraith on The Affluent Society
[1958]) and on the manipulation of people by advertising men (Vance
Packard, in The Hidden Persuaders [1957] and The Status Seekers [1959]).
William H. Whyte, in The Organization Man (1956), argued that the suc-
cessful men who ran the large organisations that increasingly domi-
nated corporate America were themselves run by the organisations,
tested and monitored by corporations that fostered conformist medi-
ocrity. C. Wright Mills, in White Collar (1951), maintained that white-
collar workers sold not only their work but their personalities. As
Bradbury and Temperley write, ‘Despite the Eisenhower equilibrium, the
romanticization of anarchic unreason, and the insistence that a conflict
rather than a consensus model of society was necessary, were central
themes of the Fifties’, laying the basis for the protests of the sixties
against social and sexual repression, against injustice to minorities and
the power of the military-industrial complex.²⁷

Amongst popular genre writers, it was the noir novelists who issued
the most effective challenge to optimistic portrayals of American life.

Rejecting the pervasive ‘vocabulary of normality’, noir thrillers offered
portraits of maladjustment - what David Riesman called ‘Tales of the
Abnorm’.²⁸ The inset film plot in Charles Willeford’s The Woman Chaser
(1960) epitomises the contrast: ‘Mr Average American’, with an average
family and ‘the dullest job imaginable . . . Deadly’, causes a fatal acci-
dent and, in consequence, is isolated completely from his conventional
existence. Execrated and hunted and doomed, he ceases to be ‘a nobody’
and, ‘all alone on Highway one-oh-one - a good place to work in some
symbolism’, is suddenly someone of importance, ‘a man against the
world’ (80-2). In studies of noir, both cinematic and literary, the sixties
are often sharply divided from the fifties, but there is as much conti-
nuity as discontinuity. The sixties were no more uniformly rebellious
than the fifties were ‘uniformly conservative’, and indeed in looking at
the popular literature of the period, there is no radical break. The heyday
of the paperback originals, with their lurid cover art and sensational
cover copy, was over by the early sixties.²⁹ But some of the most notable
paperback writing careers spanned the period, extending from the
immediate postwar years through the sixties and beyond. Gil Brewer,
David Goodis, John D. MacDonald, Peter Rabe, Jim Thompson, Lionel
White, Harry Whittington and Charles Williams, all of whom were
writing in the early to mid-fifties, were still producing novels in the late
sixties and early seventies (in the case of John D. MacDonald, much
longer). The same is true of several other noir crime novelists who pub-
lished in hardback, such as Stanley Ellin, Patricia Highsmith, Ross
Macdonald, William McGivern, Margaret Millar and Helen Nielsen.

In the work of these and other American writers of the period, there
is, in comparison to the novels of the interwar years, a new emphasis
on ‘difference’ as a key determinant in the lives of the characters. The
sense  of  disillusionment  and  the  theme  of  economic  deprivation
remain, but in contrast to the archetypal noir protagonist of the inter-
war years, the alienated figures of the post-World War Two period are
less likely to be victims of economic failure and deprivation than of
exclusion and displacement. The social background against which they
are defined is more often characterised as one of material prosperity and
cultural conformity; characters’ anxieties more commonly spring from
pressures towards loyalty and uniformity. This is not just a matter of
the McCarthyite themes that run through many novels. It can also be
seen, for example, in relation to the more insistent use of a small town
environment, which acts as a locus for exploring hostility to deviance,
stereotyping, moral platitudes, social and racial prejudice. Jim Thomp-
son’s novels are particularly associated with the satiric dissection of the

closed community, but many other writers of the time (such as Harry
Whittington, John D. MacDonald, Day Keene and Charles Williams)
produced comparable critiques. As the protagonist of Day Keene’s Noto-
rious (1954) is warned, ‘“The eyes of your fellow citizens in Bay Bayou
are on you”’ (91).

The chapters in this section examine three types of character recur-
rently found in the novels of 1945-70. The protagonist killer, the femme
fatale and the stranger or outcast are all used by their creators to probe
and subvert what they see as the complacent conformity of the time.
The protagonist killer is a man acting to change a given set of circum-
stances (compared to many other noir protagonists, he does possess
agency). He acts to change things through revenge, ‘cleansing’ society
or righting a wrong; he murders in order to profit or to achieve upward
mobility, that is, to change his economic and social circumstances. If
he is more radically alienated from ‘normality’, the killer may act to
undermine the whole social order. The avengers, in comparison to
earlier figures like the Op and Satan Hall, are more isolated and may
themselves be trying to escape from the demands for conformity to a
particular code or organisational loyalty (as in Stark [Westlake], Rabe
and McGivern). Those who kill for profit (for example, in Whittington’s
Web of Murder) frequently function as satiric representations of capital-
ist enterprise and greed. Their willingness to kill to achieve their ends
exposes the brutality of a widely upheld business ethic. The killer might
be a psychotic figure who sees himself as a saviour, and whose aggres-
sion leads him towards the insights of the savage satirist: Thompson’s
novels furnish the most striking instances here, but notable examples
are also found in the work of Vin Packer and Patricia Highsmith. The
psychopath embodies the flaws hidden by a conformist society -
Thompson’s Lou Ford, for example, whose mocking adherence to social
pieties hides the latent sadism which prompts him to punish as well as
to expose.

It is really only in the post-World War Two period that the femme
fatale becomes a significant part of noir narratives. In Hollywood, as
Frank Krutnik points out, the iconic figure of the fatal woman became
much more central from the mid-forties on. Studios producing hard-
boiled thrillers introduced or increased the importance of the love-story
element, so that, instead of being merely one aspect of the protagonist’s
quest (as in Maltese Falcon), the entanglement with a woman compli-
cates the whole of the action and undermines the masculine ethos of
the investigative thriller.³⁰ Fatal women also begin to appear much more
frequently in literary noir, and in more diverse roles than was possible

in the cinema. Publishers had quickly recognised that more sex brought
higher sales, and the new paperback originals aimed not just for ‘gritty
realism’ but for frank eroticism, ‘lacking in . . . conventional morality,
and with an iconoclastic eagerness to explore the controversial and the
taboo’.³¹  Inevitably in fifties America there were expressions of public
outrage at the liberties taken, with the result that the paperback indus-
try was investigated in 1952 by the House Select Committee on Current
Pornographic Materials. However, although pressures continued, there
was no overt censorship.³² The less predictable representation of women
in literary than in cinematic noir may in part be due to the fact that
Hollywood, subservient to the Production Code, was more straight-
jacketed. Film-makers, though capitalising on the appeal of the sexually
dangerous woman, were forced to make concessions to conventional
morality. The stereotypical strong woman plot was given its most char-
acteristic shape in film noir by the general requirement that such women
were to be punished or otherwise excluded by the end of the narrative.
This pattern is also, of course, present in the literary noir of these
decades, and both films and novels can be read as expressions of male
anxiety about the independent woman. In the novels, however, there
is much more scope for variation and for playing against conventional
expectations. Although, as a glance at the cover art makes clear, the
greater measure of freedom could scarcely be said to have done away
with the stereotypical representation of women, paperback narratives
were less constrained than films by notions of acceptable plots, and
many of the novels that give central roles to women explicitly confront
the issue of gender stereotyping. Narratives are centred, for example,
on the overturning of social expectations, about, say, the relationship
between a woman’s appearance and her character. Writers such as
Thompson, Williams and Brewer satirise male views of women. Others,
like Bardin and Millar, challenge conventional images by creating
female protagonists who fulfil the functions traditionally assumed by
male characters, whether as investigative figures or as protagonist killers
whose actions are an implicit criticism of the male world that shaped
them.

The novels of the period are also less constrained than film noir in
their representation of social and racial marginality, developing a wide-
ranging critique of the treatment of those who are outside ‘normal’,
prosperous, white, middle-class society. The marginalised white pro-
tagonists are more often portrayed as alienated from the whole idea of
a cohesive, normative social structure, as, for example, in the novels of

Goodis. Several other white writers of the time take the step of choos-
ing black protagonists who are racially outcast, persecuted, prejudged
and shut out by the dominant society. In some cases a character’s mar-
ginality is self-imposed, as in Goodis novels like Cassidy’s Girl or Down
There, in which a protagonist deliberately circumscribes his own life.
Many characters, however, are represented as imprisoned by an inher-
ited past of class or racial marginality. As French critics of the period
perceived, there was an intersection between tough-guy and black
protest writing, which had natural affinities with the left-wing existen-
tialism of Sartre and others,³³ and one of the things I will consider most
closely in Part II (Chapter 6) is the way in which difference and exclu-
sion become central themes in the absurdist Harlem cycle of Chester
Himes.

My emphasis in Part II will be strongly American. The combination
of Hollywood film noir and the hugely creative energy that went into
the rapidly expanding pulp fiction market were the most important con-
tributions of the time to the phenomenon of the noir thriller. The
American literary noir of this period was unmatched. Writers like
Thompson, Goodis, Williams and Willeford, amongst many others, pro-
duced some of the classics of the genre. Although the links with British
writing do not disappear, the hundreds of crime paperbacks published
in postwar Britain were primarily imitations of American tough-guy and
gangster pulps. In addition to the novels of Cheyney and Chase, there
were the even more rapidly produced, pseudonymous novels put out by
the numerous small ‘mushroom’ publishers that sprang up to feed the
British mass paperback market, a phenomenon very fully documented
by Steve Holland in The Mushroom Jungle.³⁴ The appetite for American
hard-boiled crime thrillers had started to grow in the forties. Encour-
aged by the huge success of No Orchids for Miss Blandish, which sold over
a million copies between 1939 and 1944, writers like Frank Dubrez
Fawcett, Harold Kelly and Stephen Frances (writing under the names,
respectively, of Ben Sarto, Darcy Glinto and Hank Janson, but under
other names as well) had by the mid-forties started to produce an aston-
ishing array of low-priced crime paperbacks.³⁵  Written at speed and
printed on rationed paper, these short novels were unashamedly aimed
at the mass market. Using a variety of catchy pen-names, the British
gangster novelists churned out versions of every available American
plot: the young man who is in too deep with gangsters or who even-
tually seizes his chance to go straight (Al Bocca’s She Was No Lady; Darcy
Glinto’s Protection Pay-Off ); the amateur crook who gets involved with

big-time criminals (Hank Janson’s Don’t Cry Now); the crumbling of a
mob and the exposure of ‘every rat in town’ (Al Bocca’s City Limit
Blonde); gangsters double-crossing one another (Duke Linton’s Dames
Die Too!) or falling out over a woman (Hank Janson’s Flight from Fear);
wrong-man narratives (Janson’s Menace and Play It Quiet); first-person
accounts of a gangster’s ill-fated career (Janson’s Devil’s Highway) or of
involvement in graft and corruption (Sammy Coburn, Uneasy Street);
small-town iniquities (Janson’s Hellcat); the white slave trade (Janson’s
Mistress of Fear and Glinto’s Lady - Don’t Turn Over).

Because of the imitative nature of most British noir during the
period, these are novels that tend not to confront specific socio-
political concerns, although they often create lively variations on the
key themes of American thrillers. At the less popular end of the scale,
however, was the relatively slim output of a handful of writers who did
engage with the nature of postwar British society, such as Gerald Kersh,
Gerald Butler, Maurice Procter, John Lodwick and Julian Symons.³⁶ The
Britain of these years was a country in which almost everything was
rationed: ‘In a very real sense these austerity years were a threshold to
the whole first postwar era: rock-hard and grey, whitened maybe by

dedication and labour. . .           .’ 37    There was still a strong sense of civic

loyalty (to the monarchy, the police), and the period was characterised
by a marked time-lag vis-à-vis the United States. Prosperity was much
later in coming. Only toward the end of the fifties did people finally
begin to think of Britain in terms of Galbraith’s phrase, ‘the affluent
society’. There was still a sense of optimistic consensus and a feeling
that Britain was cosily separate, with its humour, tolerance and decency.
But there was also a new sense of an attack on British insularity, com-
fortableness, stereotypical assumptions and parochialism, and part of
what these changes produced was a distinctively British version of alien-
ation and marginality, apparent in the British thrillers of writers like
Butler and Lodwick.³⁸ In comparison to their American contemporaries,
these are writers preoccupied less with conformity than uniformity, with
the ‘dulling’ of society and the mediocre greyness that leads protago-
nists to seek adventure. These are, however, writers who are little
remembered today in comparison to Thompson, Goodis and others.
This was unquestionably the most ‘American’ period of noir. It was a
time during which American thriller-writing and influence on popular
culture were overwhelmingly strong, with ‘home grown’ British noir the
exception rather than the rule. The large markets both in England and
France were primarily dominated by novelists who produced pastiche
American hard-boiled crime fiction - and although there can clearly be

important examples of noir in which a writer does not use the materi-
als of his own society, the wholly imitative pulp novel does lose one of
the most important defining characteristics of the noir thriller, that is,
its responsiveness to the obsessions and anxieties of the society that
produced it.