Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and '40s

National Review, Dec 22, 1997 by Terry Teachout

Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s & '40s, edited by Robert Polito (Library of America, 990 pp., $35)

Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, edited by Robert Polito (Library of America, 892 pp., $35)

Mr. Teachout, the music critic of Commentary, is currently at work on a biography of H. L. Mencken.

THE Library of America, a nonprofit publisher whose dust jackets declare it to be "dedicated to preserving America's best and most significant writing in handsome, enduring volumes," has brought out a pair of volumes containing 11 examples of what has lately come to be called "noir fiction," after the cinematic genre of the Forties known as film noir. No such fancy name was applied to these short novels when they first appeared in paperback, bedecked with cheesy cover art and tumescent blurbs promising their semi-literate purchasers the cheapest of thrills. Forty years ago, Jim Thompson's The Killer inside Me and Charles Willeford's Pick-Up were smut; now they belong to the ages.

Arrant relativism? Well, yes, and then some. But while the noir novelists scarcely deserve to be ranked among America's best and most significant writers, their harsh tales are infinitely more readable than the chokingly tedious output of a thousand American writers of impeccably correct reputation, and I venture to guess that people will still be turning the pages of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and Cornell Woolrich's I Married a Dead Man long after the likes of Toni Morrison and Allan Gurganus are remembered only by aging professors of literary theory who wonder why nobody signs up for their classes any more.

Noir fiction is not the same as the "hard-boiled" detective stories of Raymond Chandler and his progeny. Most hard-boiled novels are installments in a series featuring a recurring hero who beneath his cynical exterior is actually an idealistic knight errant; most noir novels are one-offs whose desperate protagonists either die in the last chapter or wish they had. (Only two of the books reprinted here, Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley and Chester Himes's The Real Cool Killers, are series novels.) The difference is crucial. Chandler's novels are powerful expressions of his loathing for the moral corruption of modern American life, but they also presuppose the existence of honorable men who can rise above that corruption. In the nihilistic world of noir, by contrast, everyone is tainted, and every human act -- including the act of love --leads but to the grave.

This bleak vision is as confining as the flat, sour prose in which most noir novels are written, but its narrowness is the source of its underlying strength: noir fiction never, ever goes soft at the end. Similarly, the noir novelists consistently refused to indulge in the easy political pointmaking that such lesser contemporaries as John Steinbeck found irresistible. While some of their books, most notably Edward Anderson's Thieves like Us, can certainly be read as critiques of the American class system, social commentary always took a back seat to action. Yet it was precisely because they did not play the blame game that the noir novelists made a far more telling critique of American individualism: rarely has the corrosive loneliness of urban life been more memorably portrayed than in their best work. (Predictably but appropriately, a painting by Edward Hopper, the poet of American alienation, is reproduced on the dust jacket of the first volume.)

Robert Polito, Jim Thompson's biographer, has chosen the novels, edited the texts, and supplied the pithy notes that are, here as always, among the most useful features of the Library of America's well-made volumes. His picks are consistently sound, and they serve as a welcome reminder that not all noir fiction is set in Los Angeles on a rainy night in 1946; I was especially pleased by the inclusion of William Lindsay Gresham's Nightmare Alley, the horrific story of a carnival shill turned spiritualist minister, and Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock, by far the cleverest of the many novels that purport to tell what it was like to work for Time in the far-off days of Henry Luce:

The [story] conference went on, like all those that had gone before, and, unless some tremendous miracle intervened, like many hundreds sure to follow. . . . Down the hall, in Sydney's office, there was a window out of which an almost forgotten associate editor had long ago jumped. I occasionally wondered whether he had done so after some conference such as this. Just picked up his notes and walked down the corridor to his own room, opened the window, and then stepped out.

The flap copy calls these eleven novels "underground classics." In fact, some were best-sellers and attracted the notice of leading critics (Edmund Wilson wrote about The Postman Always Rings Twice and Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?), and eight were made into films, not a few of which were both financially and artistically successful (Francois Truffaut, no less, turned David Goodis's Down There into Shoot the Piano Player).