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.

Reliable Narrator or Writer Pursuing a Story?

Time now to turn the light of inquiry squarely on yourself, reminding you as you do so of the many film noir scenes you've watched at various stages of your life in which one or more detectives was attempting to lead a suspect along the perilous border running between the landscape of guilt and the loftier one of exculpation.  The inquisitor may or may not have had a hunch or gut feeling about the relative guilt or innocence of the accused.  He may also have had the cynicism that allowed the belief that all of us are guilty of something.  Or, as some of my lawyer friends have said as the level in the bottle declined, My clients all lie to me in some degree or another.  The inquisitor may simply be doing a job that runs on the duality of guilt and innocent--suspects are one or the other.  Questioning them will bring you and them to one conclusion or the other.  No middle ground.  

Thus the question:  How reliable a narrator are you?  This followed with:  Can your account of an event be trusted?  Add to this the follow-up: Have you a motive or agenda that will color your narration?

The answer to the latter is an emphatic yes.  My motive is to amuse, to inform, to cause suspenseful apprehension, to surprise.  Much as I admire Stephen King, I do not seek to emulate his intent of frightening the reader, although I do not think frightening the reader to be an unworthy aim.

I write in the spirit of observation, energized by the growing involvement in that observation, finding in it meaning and satisfaction from the truths, untruths, layers of meaning and intent that become apparent as I go.  Of course I present questions to these invented characters and situations, thinking they too should squirm in situations as I have squirmed, sometimes in later recognition of how wrong or foolish I was, other times in amazement at what I have learned from a simple transaction.

Guilt and innocence are neither my pole stars nor my cynical quotas, nor do right and wrong call out to me for representation or dramatization; all these are merely settings within a larger landscape of experience and behavior.  Guilt, innocence, right, and wrong are merely costumes the characters wear while performing their parts in the larger drama of trying to get things done and of their attitudes and composure when confronting the true guiding forces of story--consequence.  Take away their routine, their status, and their dignity, then see how they respond, then start writing because then the story has begun.