Hardboiled/Noir Writers Part 10

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine

Not since the 1950's have we had such a flood of talent in the world of dark crime fiction. But for all that, noir has, for the most part, remained a relatively underground phenomena, nurturing itself down there in the dark and damp. These writers have chosen this for themselves, and one can only assume they do it for love of the genre. Here are some more of the modern Masters of Noir.


Anthony Neil Smith keeps writing wonderful, sleazy noirs with beautifully constructed and labyrinthine plots, and I for one can't get enough of what he's doing.
Psychosomatic
Yellow Medicine
Choke on Your Lies
Hogdoggin'
The Drummer


Victor Gischler, like Joe Lansdale, writes wonderfully in multiple genres, but for our concerns here I'm focusing on his pitch-perfect, tight-as-a-drum crime novels. Gischler writes like a madman, and you stand warned that addiction could soon follow:
Gun Monkeys
The Deputy
Shotgun Opera
Suicide Squeeze
Pistol Poets


Tom Piccirilli is fearless and intense and will shake the shit right out of you. There's an honesty to his work that is rare, even in the circles of crime fiction writers we've been discussing. If you want characters and situations that will stay with you long after you've read them, try Piccirilli.
Every Shallow Cut
The Coldest Mile
Nightjack
Short Ride to Nowhere
A Choir of Ill Children
The Last Deep Breath


Lynn Kostoff has a uniquely literary voice. I realize that's a vague statement, but read him and you'll see what I mean. He's a master of understatement and sly nasty humor, and you could be half-way through one of his books, enjoying the hell out of it, before you even realize you're reading a genre work. Kostoff is a modern master and I wish he'd write more.
A Choice of Nightmares
Late Rain
The Long Fall


Charlie Stella could well be our next Elmore Leonard, except that we still have Elmore Leonard. Whatever: Stella is a superstar, an amazing writer with a dead-on ear for dialogue, screwed-up criminal protagonists, and break-neck pacing. There's never a single wasted word, let alone wasted scene, in a Charlie Stella novel. He sets a new benchmark, this guy.
Charlie Opera
Johnny Porno
Jimmy Bench-Press
Cheapskates
Shakedown


Charlie Williams pens the black-as-pitch but funny-as-hell adventures of Royston Blake, the maniacal bouncer/half-baked tough guy/ne'er-do-well of the town of Mangel. These books are amazing fun, and unique in that Royston narrates in his hypnotic lower-class Brit dialect. I always find myself reading them out-loud.
Deadfolk
Booze & Burn
King of the Road
One Dead Hen


Scott Phillips writes brilliantly crafted noir with a wicked sense of humor. His books all have that uneasy feeling that it could all fall apart any moment, but Phillips is totally in control, and just gets better and better with every book.
The Ice Harvest
The Walkaway
Cottonwood
The Adjustment


Roger Smith comes from South Africa, and before turning to noir fiction he wrote screenplays. That background is evident is his work: fast-paced, steeped in the blackest shadows, staying true to the noir vision. He's a major new talent.
Dust Devils
Mixed Blood
Wake Up Dead


Vicki Hendricks writes full-on, uneasily sexy fiction that draws comparison to James M. Cain and other creators of steamy, tragic noir. Her work is raw and fierce, and highly recommended.
Iguana Love
Cruel Poetry
Miami Purity
Sky Blues



You might be surprised at my inclusion of Dennis Lehane here, since he could easily be catagorized with all the "doorstop thriller" authors discussed earlier. His books are invariably looong, and he also has a startling tendency to make best-seller charts on a regular basis. But here's the thing that lets him out: Lehane's books seldom seem to drag, despite the length. Chalk it up to his skill with pacing, his insight into real human doubts and concerns, and characters that you are really, truly interested in.
Shutter Island
Mystic River
Gone, Baby, Gone
A Drink Before the War
Moonlight Mile


The resurgence of interest in noir has affected the varied world of comic books as well. Here are four writers noteworthy in the field:


Ed Brubaker is the man most responsible for proving that comics can transcend super-heroics and depict hardboiled/noir every bit as well as straight novels. He infused Batman and Catwoman with superior noir creds before turning to more traditional crime stories in graphic novel format.
Criminal
Sleeper
Incognito


Brian Azzarello is another brilliant comic book writer, heavily influenced by Jim Thompson and David Goodis, but his sizzling dialogue is purely his own. The new Vertigo Crime line of graphic novels kicked off with an Azzarello title.
Filthy Rich
Johnny Double
100 Bullets


Frank Miller is inconsistent as a writer, but deserves recognition for the stunning and brutal series of Sin City graphic novels he wrote and drew.
Sin City
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For
Sin City: That Yellow Bastard


Jason Aaron currently writes two of the finest ongoing comic series out there. He's tough-minded, unsentimental, and deeply committed to brutally honest character development.
Scalped
PunisherMAX

... and you know what? That little survey of modern noir writers really only scratches the surface, and doesn't take into account so many other writers who've only recently made the scene with a single novel, and who could very well wind up having a tremendous impact. It's hard, if not impossible, to gauge an author's skill and vision based on a single work, although it's not unheard of for someone to write a single book that knocks everyone senseless and never follow up with a second.

I can tell you this much, anyway: there are several of them out there that I intend to keep an eye on. I expect great things.

So there you have it: a history of the genre we love in ten easy installments. Noir is a very loose term, of course; it’s always in flux, always changing. Even as it looks backward and gains inspiration from all that’s come before, it’s the most forward-thinking of all literary genres. It changes. Just when you think you’ve got it defined, it grows out of its old threads and embraces new concerns.

One thing all great hardboiled/noir has in common, though, is its concern with the human condition and the darkest impulses in our souls. Because if we can’t acknowledge those things about ourselves, we can never tame them. As long as there are humans who wonder about their place in the world, and ponder the void, we’ll always have noir.

I owe a debt in writing this to various essays and commentary by Ed Gorman, Cullen Gallagher, Geoffrey O'Brien, Dave Zeltserman, and Bill Pronzini, as well as numerous other sources all over the web and in print. Thanks also to Lawrence Block, Brian Lindenmuth, and everyone else who offered corrections and clarifications on the fly.

If you have comments or suggestions (I’ve probably neglected about a hundred great writers!) feel free to contact me at heathlowrance@gmail.com.

Hardboiled/Noir Writers Part 8

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven

--More Who Carried the Torch--


Throughout the seventies, eighties and nineties, hardboiled fiction held on, despite the industry's best attempts to make it soft and easy. It's because of the few writers who held tight to the hardboiled vision that we're now enjoying a new resurgence of interest in noir.

Here are some more essential talents who carried the torch:


Walter Mosley started his writing career with a terrific run of books about Easy Rawlins, a black P.I. in the L.A. of the 1950’s. Very noir, with writing as rich and evocative as Chandler or Ross MacDonald.

A Red Death
White Butterfly
Black Betty
Little Yellow Dog
Devil in a Blue Dress



James Ellroy is the mad dog of modern crime fiction. He doesn't write thrillers so much as crime-ridden historical epics, examining the darkest corners of the 20th century. His books are benchmarks in the genre—humorless, bleak, violent and cynical. Also, amazingly well written.

L.A. Confidential
The Big Nowhere
Killer on the Road
Brown’s Requiem
The Black Dahlia
Blood's a Rover



Andrew Vachss wrote what was perhaps the most brutal ongoing series in the genre these last few years, the novels about the obsessed Burke. Stark and focused. Vachss is an outspoken advocate for abused children. His non-Burke novel “The Getaway Man” is one of the purest modern noirs you’ll ever read.

Flood
Strega
Blue Belle
Hard Candy
Blossom
The Getaway Man



I don’t need to tell you about Elmore Leonard, do I? Amazingly prolific and one of the finest writers working today. Much has already been said about his dead-on dialogue and seedy characters. To list all his great books would take pages, but here's just a few that I can heartily recommend.

The Hot Kid
Riding The Rap
Out of Sight
Pagan Babies
Toshimingo Blues
Killshot
Maximum Bob



Joe R. Lansdale is, quite simply, the man. His style is distinctly Texas Noir, wry and funny and dark. He writes wonderfully in multiple genres, but when he ventures into noir territory, he’s especially awesome. Lansdale is a good reason not to kill yourself. Here are a few gems:

Savage Season
Cold in July
Mucho Mojo
The Two-Bear Mambo
The Bottoms
Sunset And Sawdust
Vanilla Ride
Devil Red



Surprisingly, one of the best writers of tough-minded noir these days is seldom if ever marketed as such. Cormac McCarthy isn’t the first name you think of when you think of the genre, but his books are tight, spare, and punctuated with sharp and unexpected doses of violence. Amazing stuff.

No Country for Old Men
Blood Meridian
The Road
The Crossing


--Door-Stop Thrillers--

The end of the 20th Century saw the beginning of the Age of the Door-stop Thriller-- that is, crime or mystery novels that are very long and very dense. Until then, the thriller by it's very nature was short and tight-- a quick read for a sleepless night-- but the market had opened up finally to longer works, written by authors with clearly literary concerns... sometimes.

Other times, they were just looong books.

Regardless, these writers appear consistently on best-seller charts, have massive readerships, and are practically cottage industries-- crime fiction straight enough to appeal to the masses but just noir-tinged enough to have appeal to readers with darker tastes.



One of the most popular and influential of these door-stop thriller writers was, and still is, James Lee Burke. His novels about Dave Robiecheux are densely plotted and the language is lush and Faulknerian. They may suffer from 'sprawl', but Robiecheux is a great example of a deeply flawed hero, trying to deal with his inner demons while tracking down the bad guys.

Black Cherry Blues
A Morning for Flamingoes
In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead
A Stained White Radiance
Crusader’s Cross



John Connolly made a big splash with his first novels about Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker, an ex-cop haunted by the brutal slayings of his wife and daughter. Like James Lee Burke, Connolly's books are often well-padded with extemporaneous filler, but his voice as an author is layered and colorful, and the crime thriller backdrop is sometimes shot through with a strange dose of the supernatural.

Every Dead Thing
Dark Hollow
The Killing Kind
The White Road



Lee Child is most notable for his series featuring tough hero and force of nature, Jack Reacher. Like many other modern suspense writers, Child has a tendency to go longer than the story can maintain, but his books are more violent and intense than most series characters these days. Very hardboiled.

The Killing Floor
The Enemy
One Shot
The Hard Way
Persuader



Ian Rankin has been called the master of ‘Tartan Noir’—which goes to show you that the media loves a silly label. Like some of the other modern writers I just mentioned, Rankin's work is sometimes puffed up with filler. Regardless, his novels about Inspector Rebus are very well-written and relentlessly bleak.

Knots & Crosses
Hide & Seek
Tooth & Nail
Strip Jack
The Black Book
Mortal Causes


Next Wednesday: Part Nine: The New Noir.

Hardboiled/Noir Writers Part 7

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six

--The Ones Who Carried the Torch--

Hardboiled/Noir never really went away. Although the Golden era ended in the early ‘60’s, there were still plenty of writers who loved the form too much to let it die, and many of them made lasting contributions and continued to add amazing diversity and vision.

The hardboiled school, especially, thrived in its own way through the seventies and eighties. There were many great detective writers in that period—some more hardboiled than others—and by the mid-eighties a small renaissance had taken place.

The Travis McGee books by John D. MacDonald continued to sell well, and McGee’s tough guy sensitivity (so at odds with earlier tough guys) rubbed off on his contemporaries. Robert Parker’s books about Boston P.I. Spenser took the genre in a new direction, featuring a hero who loved literature and philosophy, respected women, and used violence only as a last resort.

Female writers of detective fiction began having a serious impact. Sue Grafton and her protagonist Kinsey Millhone hit the bestseller charts with A is for Alibi and a whole alphabet of mysteries after; Sara Paretsky broke sales records with her series about female private dick V.I. Warshawski, starting with Indemnity Only.

But while these developments were a good sign for society as a whole, it’s debatable whether or not the new sensitivity was good for the soul of noir. The thing that defined the genre had always been a sort of disaffection, a—dare I say it?—existential angst.

But even when it looked as if the hardboiled world might suddenly go softboiled, there were still writers of vision down there in the trenches, dredging up all sorts of savory ugliness. Here’s a few of the most noteworthy:



James Crumley proved hugely influential on the detective story writers who came after him with his books about alcoholic dick C.W. Shugrue, and another brief series about a character called Milo Milodragovitch. Here’s a few to start:
The Last Good Kiss
The Mexican Tree Duck
The Wrong Case
The Dancing Bear



George V. Higgins debut novel startled readers with its crisp, realistic dialogue and almost laconically depicted action. He wrote several fine novels throughout the '70's and '80's, but he'll be most remembered for his first, The Friends of Eddie Coyle.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
The Digger's Game
A City on a Hill
Dreamland



Edward Bunker brought to his fiction his own life experiences as a convicted bank robber and drug dealer. He was the real deal, and his hardboiled prose jabbed relentlessly at the hypocrisy that Bunker saw inherent within so-called "straight" society.
No Beast So Fierce
The Animal Factory
Little Boy Blue
Dog Eat Dog



Bill Pronzini is mostly known for his terrific series about the Nameless Detective (who first appeared in 1971), Pronzini is also a noted scholar of the hardboiled school and a terrific editor. Fortunately for us, he’s still writing tight, solid hardboiled masterpieces. Here’s a few by him:
Savages
Fever
Schemers
The Other Side of Silence



Joe Gores: Like Hammett before him, Gores turned a brief career as a P.I. into a convincing career as a detective story writer. He’s mostly famous for his D.K.A. series, but also for the screenplay to the movie “Hammett”.
Spade & Archer: a Prequel to The Maltese Falcon
Glass Tiger
Cases
Cons, Scams & Grifts



Lawrence Block made an impact with his clever and fast-paced noir novels in the '60's (see Part Five), and in the decades that followed he created many memorable series characters, such as Evan Tanner, Keller, and Bernie Rhodenbarr. But his greatest impact began in 1976 with the first Matt Scudder book. These are my favorite P.I. novels, although Scudder isn’t strictly a P.I. They are intense, bleak, and tightly plotted, and Scudder is one of the more intriguingly damaged protagonists you’ll ever read about. Here's a sampling:
Time to Murder and Create
The Sins of the Fathers
Out on the Cutting Edge
When the Sacred Ginmill Closes
In the Midst of Death
A Stab in the Dark



Like Block, Donald Westlake hit it big at the tail end of the second Golden Age of Noir. As Richard Stark, he wrote the one-of=a-kind series about Parker, the icily amoral professional thief(again, see Part Five). But throughout the seventies, eighties, nineties and 00's, Westlake also penned some of the most clever and funny "heist novels" ever written. Near the end of his career, he made a return to edgy noir under his real name, turning out a handful of books that assured his legacy would never die. Here's a handful of highly-recommended noirs by this master, from the beginning of his career to the end.
The Mercenaries (aka The Cutie)
Pity Him Afterwards
Somebody Owes Me Money
The Axe
The Hook
Put a Lid on It



Ed Gorman is a treasure; one of those old-school workhorses who seldom lands a foot wrong in his plotting and pacing. His books are models of what solid detective fiction should look like, especially his series about Jack Dwyer. A sampling:
Grave’s Retreat
The Poker Club
Rough Cut
Breaking Up is Hard to Do
The Midnight Room



Loren Estleman: You'd think the whole "private dick" thing would be totally played out by now, but Estleman infuses it with new life every time while maintaining its best traditions. Maybe I’m biased, being a Detroit guy, but Estleman’s Amos Walker novels are sharply observant, funny, and paced faster than a Detroit freeway. For the pure P.I. story, the line goes from Chandler to Ross MacDonald and right to Estleman. He’s also penned a terrific series of crime thrillers taking place in various eras of Detroit’s history. Here’s a random sampling:
Motor City Blue
Every Brilliant Eye
Poison Blonde
Retro
Nicotine Kiss
American Detective
Whiskey River
Stress



Derek Raymond has been called the Father of English Noir. His concerns as a writer seem to have been particularly existential. He's most famous for his series of "Factory" detective novels.
He Died with His Eyes Open
The Devil's Home on Leave
How the Dead Live
I Was Dora Suarez


Max Allan Collins is most notable for his Nate Heller series of P.I. mysteries. What makes these books worth reading, aside from Collins dead-on voice and great plotting, are the fact-based historical twentieth-century murders each novel is built around. Apparently, Heller was around for every major crime committed in the 20th Century. Try these:
Angel in Black
Dying in the Postwar World
True Crime
True Detective
The Million Dollar Wound

Next time: More writers who kept the flame burning, and the Age of the Door-stop Thriller.

go to Part Eight

Noir/Hardboiled Writers Part 1

I wrote the original version of this a couple years ago, mostly in an attempt to sort it all out for myself. At the time, I had no idea there was such a thriving "noir underground" on line, or that I'd wind up becoming friends with some of the writers mentioned. I also had no clue how little I actually knew... since writing this series of essays, I've learned a great deal from more legitimate noir historians, and I've also been introduced to tons of newer writers in the genre by various other readers.

And so here's the new, revised, edited and expanded series of essays called Noir/Hardboiled Writers. If you're interested, check in every Wednesday evening for the next part.

Part One



Tough guys. Dangerous dames. Hapless losers. Psychopathic villains. Racetracks, seedy bars, swank nightclubs. Crooked cops and crumbling tenement houses.

Welcome to the underbelly: the dark, cynical heart of the American dream. This is the City of Hardboiled, the neighborhood of Noir. It’s a great place to visit, but… well, you know the drill.

This is a particularly American place, even though in recent years it’s managed to export itself around the world, taking root in England and France, Mexico and Algiers, even Norway if you can believe it. Seems that there’s plenty of existential angst to go around in this world. But the source of the virus is the States, no question. That’s where the infections first occurred, that’s where the buildings first went up and the private dick had his first shot of whisky and the grifter made his first score.

It’s hard to say where it all started, this school of hardboiled lyricism and noir dread. If you wanted to get really deep about it, you could say it started with Mark Twain, the first American writer to use a distinctly American voice. Ernest Hemingway noted that all American literature comes from one book, Huckleberry Finn, and yeah, he’s pretty much right. But maybe we’re putting too fine a point on it.

As early as the 1890’s, Twain not withstanding, we had action-packed stories of two-fisted heroes, knocking the crap out of Victorian-style villains and rescuing damsels—Nick Carter was probably the first (or at least the most successful) of these cardboard cut-out heroes. He appeared in tons of cheap chapbooks, circulated all over the country and mostly reserved for the newly-literate masses, who were, let’s face it, not particularly sophisticated in their reading habits.

But really, there’s nothing hardboiled or noir about those stories. They’re totally prelude.

Those chapbooks led to the great magazine boom of the early 20th century, and that’s really where things get rolling. In the early days, fiction magazines were general interest—they’d have, say, a western story, a detective thriller, a story of high seas adventure, etcetera. But by the early ‘20’s most of them had become more specialized. By far, the best-selling magazines were of the ‘detective’ variety.

Dime Detective. Thrilling Detective. Spicy Detective Stories. There were tons of them.

The king of detective magazines, though, was Black Mask, and that’s where the hardboiled style first emerged.




But we still haven’t defined our terms. Hardboiled and noir are not really the same thing, even though they often go hand-in-hand. A story can be hardboiled without having a trace of noir, and vice-versa.

Hardboiled came first, in those unsettled and uncertain times between the two world wars. It’s a genre defined by it’s rejection of sentiment. It portrays crime and violence in a stark, unromantic light. You could say “realism”, but that’s not really true—in most hardboiled stories, there isn’t much realism to speak of. It’s more of a “hyper-realism”, a distorted representation of the world that feels real while you’re immersed in it, that feels like the world you’re most afraid of.

Hardboiled stories usually feature a detective hero—not always, but often enough that you notice it when they don’t. This detective hero is usually every bit as tough as the villains he comes across, and he’s almost always the wittiest guy in the room. He’s cool. Cocky, even. You wish you were as cool as this guy.

Noir eventually popped out of the skull of hardboiled, fully formed. It’s basically a sort of role-reversal of protagonists—the central character in a noir isn’t usually the “knight in tarnished armor”-type; he’s the lowlife the knight is trying to nail.

Noir implies a certain dark tone, cynical, fatalistic, with a particular sort of cast of characters—generally people on the fringe of normal society, doing things you could only politely describe as anti-social. There is invariably a sense of impending doom, as a protagonist fights—or doesn’t fight—against an end that is, really, inevitable. Life sucks and then you die, that sort of thing. Granted, that’s a broad definition, and it doesn’t take into account about a ton of other things that come to mind when you think of “noir”, but that’s the general idea.

But you know, there are even finer distinctions these days. In recent years, the term “psycho-noir” gets thrown around quite a bit. Obviously, it’s a further refinement of noir, but its definition is a little trickier. Noted noir author Dave Zeltserman, wrote that “psycho-noir” is the type of story…

"...where the protagonists perceptions and rationalizations are just off center enough to send them to hell."

I think the main difference between “noir” and “psycho-noir” lies in the central protagonist. In “noir”, it’s usually a normal kind of joe, maybe a bit too ambitious or a bit too flip about right and wrong, who’s drawn into a messed-up situation by circumstance or by his own hubris. He may wind up doing monstrous things, but he’s basically a decent guy who manages to fuck up royally.

The main character in a “psycho-noir”, on the other hand, is usually a monstrous person to begin with. Perhaps he’s an amoral sociopath, like Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. In some cases, like Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280, he’s a full-on delusional lunatic. The main thing is, he’s a bad guy, and not a bad guy who’s really a good guy deep inside, or is simply “misunderstood”. No, he’s the full-on villain, and the story belongs to him, and if it’s done right you still kinda want him to win.

These can be really small distinctions, of course. Sometimes, it’s difficult to find that point where “hardboiled” becomes “noir”, or where “noir” becomes “psycho-noir”, and honestly a good crime story is just a good crime story regardless, because of the elements that they have in common. And what are those? The writer Jack Bludis sums it up as neatly as anything I’ve heard:

“Noir=Screwed.”


The hardboiled/noir phenomenon didn’t happened in a vacuum, of course. It’s not as if every other writer in America between the two world wars was writing beautiful, shining monuments to happiness and optimism. Hardboiled/noir grew out of a general feeling of dissatisfaction and alienation that was reflected in the work of more mainstream or critically respected authors as well. Ernest Hemingway developed his lean, spare style of writing as a response against the excesses of his literary contemporaries, an excess he felt obscured more than illuminated. He wrote about tough men, usually, doing tough things, just like the writers of hardboiled/noir, and also like them his cynicism and despair over the human condition shined through his work.

Hemingway and Hammett are often compared. The styles they employed were similar, and some critics have accused Hammett of stealing Hemingway’s lean style outright. This is patently untrue: Hammett actually came first, in the pages of Black Mask, in 1923. Hemingway’s first book wasn’t released in the States until two years later. Not that Hemingway stole from Hammett—he certainly did not. It must have been something in the water, or maybe they drank the same brand of whisky.

Regardless, Hemingway is significant in the development of the hardboiled school. His short stories are especially relevant, and the novels A Farwell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls all show the same attitude about the world and humanity that are displayed in the genre writers.

A few years later, John Steinbeck, too, would be easily linked to the hardboiled movement with his grim novels of Depression-era America: Of Mice and Men, East of Eden, and The Grapes of Wrath.

William Faulkner was a huge fan of hardboiled and noir, and it shows in many of his books, most notably Pylon, Sanctuary, A Light in August, and the darkly comic As I Lay Dying.

If you want to know more, check out Geoffrey O'Brien's fantastic book, Hardboiled America, and "A History of Pulp", the brilliant essay by Cullen Gallagher in Beat to a Pulp: Round One, edited by David Cranmer and Elaine Ash.

Continue to Part 2, here.