Dinosaurs

A remarkable gift came your way as a review copy.  Eleven hundred sixteen pages of it.  That would be The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories, a compilation of so-called noir mystery and pulp fiction, written by some of the then masters in their field.  Black Mask Magazine was the quintessential pulp magazine, its covers bold with four-color depictions of tough gangsters, cynical cops, and machine-gun toting molls who were at once inviting and no-nonsense foreboding.  You began haunting used book stores for them, by the mid 70s owning well over a hundred, including the issue with the first appearance of Hammett's The Maltese Falcon.

By that time, you'd risen to the point of authority at Sherbourne Press where you could and did dictate policy.  "We are beginning a mystery list," you announced at one memorable meeting, trying to sound more editorial than portentous.  You were riding high, with a growing list of money makers.  You set forth to contract a number of writers whom one of your favorite authors, William F. Nolan, called The Black Mask Boys, in his anthology of those noir pulp stories.  One of your first acquisitions was The Hardboiled Dicks, which you just recently had occasion to order from Amazon.  Quickly on the heels of leasing massmarket paper rights of it to Pocket Books, you swooped down on Frank Gruber to get Brass Knuckles, a collection of his Oliver Quade, The Human Encyclopedia, stories, and Gruber's close friend, Steve Fisher, teasing from him the novel he'd considered his best, Saxon's Ghost, a haunting--literally and figuratively--tale about a professional magician named Saxon, the Great.

You were working on one of the regulars from the mystery writers' poker game, Day Keene, whom you surely thought to land; after all, Day write a Gold Medal paperback original a month.  You never got Day, but his one-time neighbor from Florida, Bob Turner, came through for you, and there was the  excitement of getting Bill S. Ballinger to let you do a reprint of a mystery you'd read as a kid, Portrait in Smoke, which did well enough for you to convince him to let you have The Forty-Nine Days of Death.  Meanwhile, you'd gotten Gruber a bit taken in wine and promising to do an autobiography focusing on his pulp days, The Pulp Jungle.

For a long moment, while reading through this massive and encompassing work, you were hit with the sudden awareness that they were all of them--those you knew personally and by reputation--gone, which brought you up with a start before the rebellion kicked in, informing you that you are way too young to be a dinosaur.  Besides, you have the book, sitting now on your shelf next to The Hardboiled Omnibus and The Hardboiled Dicks, and to have these is to have it all.

Noir

Even though French is not your language, you know enough of it to recognize noir when you see it, which is largely at funerals. You can also rationalize logical jumps from noir being black in French to a wave of French film critics calling dark, murky, moody, gloomy films by the appellation noir. If the critics had been Mexican or Spanish, we'd be talking cinema negro.

Little or no wonder that noir would bleed over to extend its coverage to the stories and novels that had their genesis in the late '50s and '60's, gathering momentum in the paperback novels of the time. In particular, Gold Medal Novels carried forth the noir sensitivity, allowing characters who did not fit well into the more traditional dreams of post-war prosperity to nevertheless dream a kind of noir version of the American Dream.

Gold Medal Novels were the extensions of the pulp magazines, particularly such rousing venues as Black Mask, Dime Detective, and Flynn's Detective Stories, where plot meant good guys struggling against the rigged game of privilege and influence. An unfortunate choice of a remantic partner invariably led to pressures that induced extraordinary risk, which in turn was guaranteed to produce consequences. Noir became the inexorable voice of consequences getting out of hand.

Combustion. The center that cannot hold. Things going awry. The Sorcerer's Apprentice with a loaded gun. These conditions and qualities became standards by which a segment of the reading public judged the stories, then stayed with them and were to some extent the same standards they saw in their own life.

Although many of these stories--magazine and paperback originals--spoke to you, they did not entirely satisfy you to the point where you remained faithful and did not stray. They reminded you in their way of a high school girlfriend whom you liked well enough and, appropriately, she liked you, although neither of you knew quite why. Perhaps your fondness for noir was because writers you admired found homes for their works therein; perhaps it was the lure of on-the-job training, perhaps it was an affinity for the voice inherent. Many of your friends who wrote noir were by no means lacking in humor. Maybe it was because, as Donald MacCampbell told you when he was your agent, noir is a kind of joke gone bad. Later, when you, as editor, signed MacCampbell for his Don't Step on It, It Might Be a Writer, he reminded you how noirish it was for a writer to be editing his agent.

No Country for Old Men is certainly noir; it begins with a drug deal gone bad, something only as steady a hand as McCarthy could bring off so convincingly in these recent years. Perhaps the notion of a joke gone bad is your portal into the dark world, and perhaps MacCampbell, were he still among the living, would think it had taken you a long time to get the picture.