A friend and writer I know, Wallace Stroby had a book launching earlier this week. I was lucky enough to attend it. It was held at the Mysterious Bookshop in lower Manhattan. Everyone likes reading a good mystery, so if you get a chance, you should visit the New York City icon that is the Mysterious Bookshop. While you are there, buy Wallace's newest book: Some Die Nameless. Wallace writes noir female protagonists and Wallace writes well. Yay.
At the launch, an off-hand question was inadvertently raised. As I mentioned in a previous post, many successful and educated writers do so by instinct. The have a distorted or poor understanding of how they reach their audience. Their success is inherent to their essence, which is why they cannot teach it to someone else. It comes naturally. However, they succeed very well and very often when they write. We call those types of people "gifted," and they are.
In discussing Wallace's plot, it was posed that a small crime that the non-detective protagonist tries to solve morphs into a crime on a much larger scale. That idea reminded me of those nested Russian dolls. The off-hand question was how does having a small mystery initiate the protagonist's investigation into a contiguous or related crime that is much larger in scope ala Chinatown, the movie.
An author I respect and who has an MFA from a major university answered, "That is what noir is. A small crime that is in some way related to a crime of a major scale, and the detective is draw into solving the larger crime while attempting to solve the lesser one. The protagonists are ordinary people who get in over their heads." While this is an erudite answer, and is partially true - true in the way that all turtles are amphibians, but not all amphibians are turtles. - it is not a definition of noir.
However, defining noir mystery is not an easy task. Most people know it when they see it, but ... oh that is another literary subject.
Here are a few definitions with the link to the source from which they were harvested.
1. From: besthorrornovels.com/noir
Noir is horror's hardboiled cousin. Noir, meaning black in French, is a subgenre of mystery that explores gritty, urban landscapes with a cynical detective who uncovers dastardly deeds. The darkness of noir is what lends it so perfectly to the horror genre. Both face dark truths that lie under the guise of normalcy. Both deal with outsiders who see the world as it truly is, be that outsider a hardboiled gumshoe or Frankenstein's monster. When Frankenstein's monster becomes the sardonic investigator, noir horror is born. Of course, that's a pretty simplistic view of the genre.
Noir, as a subgenre, did come from the hardboiled detective novels of the 1940's, but an important distinction between the two is that the protagonist does not need to be a detective or investigator. The protagonist can, in fact, be anyone so long as their attitudes match the gritty setting. Noir horror protagonists are notably outsiders who see the ugly truth of the world they live in. The are generally cynical in nature, and have the potential to be destructive either to themselves or others. Frankenstein's monster, without being a hardboiled gumshoe, is a great example of a horror noir protagonist in that he sees the world as evil and heartless and eventually changes to fit this mold.
The world, or setting, of horror noir could almost be considered a character itself. Squalid, debauched, typically urban settings are common, brimming with forces that are hostile toward the protagonist. This can be anything from a dark, careless city, like Gotham in the Batman comics, brimming with violence and mayhem to supernatural and otherworldly forces that have no use for humanity. Most importantly, the setting should be just as depraved as the characters and the events that unfold around them.
Another important aspect of noir horror is the tone. As its name suggests, this subgenre is relentlessly dark. The tone of works of horror noir is one of despair and suspicion. Themes often center around greed, corruption, oppression, or revenge, and while happy endings in horror are rare, they are particularly hard to come by in the noir genre.
The above transfers to our genre - pure noir mysteries - quite well.
Here's more.
2. From: merriam-webster.com/dictionary/noir
Definition of noir: crime fiction featuring hard-boiled cynical characters and bleak sleazy settings an example of classic noir.
3. From: wikipedia.org/wiki/Noir_fiction
Noir fiction (or roman noir) is a literary genre closely related to hardboiled genre,[1] with a distinction that the protagonist is not a detective, but instead either a victim, a suspect, or a perpetrator. Other common characteristics include a self-destructive protagonist.[2] A typical protagonist of noir fiction is dealing with the legal, political or other system, which is no less corrupt than the perpetrator, by whom the protagonist is either victimized and/or has to victimize others on a daily basis, leading to a lose-lose situation.
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