Every summer (usually in August), the annual Film Noir Festival is presented at The Cinemathéque theatre in Vancouver. Films in the noir genre are quite diverse but have a few things in common: a dark and brooding atmosphere; a cynical protagonist with a complicated past; and plot lines that are fatalistic.
Noir fiction has developed alongside films since the 1930s and ’40s, and has the same characteristics. Although classic noir novels by such authors as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett are detective stories, others are written in the form of psychological thrillers, and horror, western and science-fiction novels.
Richard Stark, one of the many pseudonyms for writer Donald E. Westlake, began writing in the 1950s; his Parker novels revolve around the eponymous anti-hero, a career criminal whose methods of murder are cold and methodical. One thing Parker (we never learn his first name) does not like is being double-crossed. While the Parker series is 24 novels long, Firebreaker (number 20) is the first to place him in our contemporary world of the internet and cyber-crime.
Classic noir author Chandler, whose first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939, is most well-known for that novel’s protagonist, Philip Marlowe. For those wanting to dive right into Chandler’s work, four of his novels — Lady in the Lake, Little Sister, Long Goodbye and Playback — are available together in an Everyman’s Library edition. Also, many of Chandler’s works have been made into films; check out the DVD of the 1946 movie adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the screenplay co-written by William Faulkner.
Like Chandler, Patricia Highsmith has also had films made of her work, namely Strangers on a Train (1953) and Carol (2016, adapted from Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt). You can try reading Strangers in novel form, then viewing the film on DVD for comparison. For more, delve into The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith (foreword by Graham Greene) featuring 63 of her best short stories.
Academic writer and commentator Roxane Gay is mostly known for her non-fiction but prior to writing those books, she penned both a collection of short stories and a novel. An Untamed State, Gay’s 2014 novel, is set in Haiti and takes the superficial form of a fairy tale — one that is a horrifying story of kidnapping and torture. In the first part of the novel, Mireille is abducted while on vacation and held for ransom, yet her wealthy father refuses to pay for her release. The second and final part depicts her in the aftermath of this traumatic event, eventually living in the United States with her mother-in-law and beginning an excruciating healing process.
Denise Mina writes in the sub-genre known as “tartan noir,” noir fiction by Scottish authors and usually set in Scotland. Her Alex Morrow series begins with Still Midnight, published in 2009. It begins abruptly with two armed but incompetent criminals breaking into a home to kidnap “Bob,” who according to the family living in the house, does not exist; they kidnap the family’s elderly father instead. Enter Morrow, a police detective with an abrasive personality and a disintegrating marriage who sees the kidnapping case given to her male colleague instead and sets out to rescue the abductee anyway. All of this is set against the damp, grey chill for which Scottish noir has become known.
Scandinavian or Nordic noir stories are police procedurals that illuminate the repressed hatred and rage beneath the rather quiet, bland exterior of Scandinavian life. The sub-genre gained international popularity with the late Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with… series. Many authors have come to prominence since then.
Sweden’s Camille Lackberg published her first novel, The Ice Princess, in 2003 (translated in 2008 by Steven T. Murray). In it, detective Patrik Hedström and writer Erica Falck investigate a suspicious suicide in which the victim is frozen into their bathtub. As the investigation continues, the seemingly idyllic town is revealed to have many, many dark secrets. Ashes to Dust by Icelandic author Yrsa Sigurðardóttir follows defence attorney Þóra as she investigates murder accusations against her client: fresh bodies have been recovered from beneath the volcanic ash that has buried an entire town.
If you’ve caught the noir bug, there many other authors to investigate. The late Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty, The Switch and Rum Punch (aka, Jackie Brown) have all been made into films. Alice Hoffman combined noir with magic realism in the highly underrated Turtle Moon. Best known for the post-apocalyptic novel The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s novella No Country for Old Men is a good introduction to rural noir (noir fiction set on farms, ranches and small towns in America). Canadian author A.S.A. Harrison died in 2013 but her sole novel, The Silent Wife, has become a contemporary suburban noir classic.
Out by Japanese detective fiction writer Natsuo Kirino (originally published in 1997 and in English in 2005), centres around a group of women who do shift work at a factory and who lead very difficult, sometimes violent, home lives. When one of them kills her husband, they all initially work together to hide the evidence. But when some of their evidence is uncovered, their friendship unravels and they become the target of a loan shark and a violent criminal.
Discover some riveting noir fiction this summer at your local library.
A Good Read is a column by Tri-City librarians that is published on Wednesdays. Vanessa Colantonio works at Coquitlam Public Library.
