Death Becomes Them

In 1945, the literary critic Edmund Wilson penned an eye-rolling put-down of detective stories titled "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" His question (he was referencing a 1926 Agatha Christie title) was rhetorical, just a snide way of saying that crime fiction was worthless. But if he were around today to pose the same question, he might do so a little more gingerly. Or he might not ask the question at all, because the answer is so glaringly obvious: darn near everybody. The number of us who have witnessed a crime firsthand may be tiny, and the number who have seen a gun fired in the commission of such a crime even smaller. But the number of people who watch these acts, day after day, night after night, in TV shows or movies, or read about them in books—that's pretty much all of us. When it comes to crime onscreen or in the pages of a book, we can't seem to get enough. Would those numbers be enough to make Wilson change his mind about crime writing? Probably not. As far as he was concerned, tripe was tripe. But if Wilson read some of the contemporary authors practicing in the genre he despised, he might not so quickly rush to judgment. Writers such as James Ellroy, Richard Price, Dennis Lehane, Donald Westlake, Walter Mosley, Laura Lippman, James Sallis, Megan Abbott, and George Pelecanos have managed to infuse crime novels with a quality of writing not seen since the days of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain (writers who, to be fair to Wilson, were the exceptions who proved his rule). Those authors from the '30s and '40s would surely be proud to keep company with the best writers in their field today. It might also tickle them to see that crime stories—especially those in the noir genre, where you can't tell the good guys from the bad and where hope and happy endings are the first things tossed overboard—have made it into the American literary pantheon. The Library of America devotes multiple volumes to the work of Chandler, Hammett, and assorted other noir novelists, as well as a true-crime anthology. Black Lizard paperbacks showcase classics in these adjacent genres, and Hard Case Crime publishes a splendid line of reprints, forgotten gems, and new work, all boasting wonderfully lurid cover art (half-clad dames, snarling gangsters, and guns going off all over the place) inspired by old paperbacks. But what might most surprise the old masters is the number of A-list literary authors who are invading their territory.

 

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Literary novelists, the very people who usually scorn genre writing, have been slumming with noir for the better part of a century. William Faulkner (Sanctuary) and Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy) may have been the first, but Norman Mailer and Truman Capote tried it, and so has Cormac McCarthy. Just this summer, two more heavy hitters have stepped up—first Denis Johnson with Nobody Move and now Thomas Pynchon with Inherent Vice, a novel set in post-Manson California, which his publisher aptly calls "part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon—private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog."

At its best, noir—books or films, it doesn't matter—is an elastic category, and like elastic, it's gone slack with age. There is not always a private detective; sometimes he's just a man with more trouble than brains or luck. Sometimes the locale is not a big city at night but a sun-baked small town. Sometimes the femme is no fatale. There's always something at stake—usually a fortune in (take your pick) jewels, inheritance, or blackmail—but winning, when there is any, is at best a matter of cutting your losses. The world these characters inhabit is ruled by malevolent gods, if there were gods who ruled.

It's hard to say where this dystopic view first found root in American letters, but you see it as early as Poe and then again in Melville and Twain. It surfaces again during the Depression, when economic hopelessness cast a long shadow over the work of such writers as Horace McCoy (They Shoot Horses, Don't They?), James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice), and Edward Anderson (Thieves Like Us). The French were the first to label the genre, in the '40s, but the stories and movies that caught their attention were mostly American, and hopelessness, futility, and, most important, failure were not supposed to be part of the American Dream. At the time, all this fell below the ra-dar of American tastemakers. Most of the films that so beguiled the French were B movies ground out by lower-rung studios. Most of the authors were pulp novelists. Never mind that a few were genuine artists (Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Patricia Highsmith, Walter Tevis). In this country, these writers were the Rodney Dangerfields of literature, ignored by American critics and serious readers until years after they were dead. But their best work possessed a rude vitality and a persuasive sense of doom, not to mention heists, shootouts, and snappy dialogue that were clearly the envy of authors who got better reviews.