What is Noir?

There's always a lot of debate on what noir is. So much so that it comes up on every noir panel at every mystery con. It's reached the point where it's kind of a joke and people roll their eyes and say things like, "French for black."

I've had my view of it challenged and changed and that's affected my writing and what I focus on. So I think it's an important question.

Chris Holm, an excellent thriller and noir author (also did a noir UF series called The Collector through Angry Robot - you should check it out, it's excellent) put it the most succinctly of anyone I've heard. "Poor options, bad decisions, dire consequences."

There's a difference between noir and hard-boiled that I think gets overlooked a lot. Chandler is hard-boiled, Hammett is hard-boiled (though maybe not his RED HARVEST, but I'm on the fence with that one). Thompson and Goodis are noir. Macbeth is so goddamn noir it should have its own tropes page (ambition, murder, a femme fatale, blackmail, backstabbing, guilt, everything falls apart, a violent end).

Hardboiled characters are, as another author, Megan Abbott put very well, tarnished knights. They are good people in bad situations who walk through the muck and come out the other side intact. Philip Marlowe might be more cynical and jaded at the end of The Big Sleep, but he's still largely the same good person he was at the beginning. Sam Spade is rougher around the edges, darker and more morally ambiguous, but he's the same way. Hard-boiled characters operate within the seediness but remain largely untouched by it.

But noir characters. They're fucked from the word go. They might survive, but they'll survive changed, probably broken. Even if they win they lose.

Noir characters are doomed and they're often doomed by their own hand. Walter Neff in Double Indemnity is a perfect example. "Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money - and a woman - and I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman." He's backed the wrong horse. And Phyllis Dietrichson, the femme fatale, who's using him, and he KNOWS he's being used and he goes along with it anyway, is just playing him. And in the end, they gun each other down.

More tragic is when it's bad decisions for the right reasons and it all goes to shit, anyway. Take John Rector's THE COLD KISS about a young couple trying to escape a bad situation and run into a hitchhiker who pays them $500.00 for a ride, only to die in their backseat with a fuckton of money. They could report it, let it go, give the cops the money and walk away. But they've got a baby on the way. They're trying to make a new life. They're stuck in a motel in Nebraska in a blizzard and that money could really com in handy. But they should really do something about this corpse.

You can probably guess how that turns out.

The weird thing about noir, though, is how hopeful it is. It's surprisingly optimistic. Noir characters are driven by hope and optimism. I know that sounds weird, but think about it. These characters are doomed. They can't be anything BUT doomed. It's who they are. It's in their DNA. So why don't they just roll over and give up? Because they have hope. They might be screwed, they might even know they're screwed, but they can't let it go. That hope's too tenacious.

So... this probably went on longer than you were expecting. Sorry. I get carried away sometimes. Anyway, short answer: "Poor options, bad decisions, dire consequences."

SOURCE