THE JOURNEY OF THE ANTIHERO

What is noir? It’s one of those catch-all concepts, an I-know-it-when-I-see-it designation, as elusive as a Santa Ana wind. It’s an American genre with a French name, a literary style perhaps best understood through the lens of film: atmospheric black and white. As a category, noir dates back to the 1920s and the writers who contributed to the pulp magazine Black Mask. These included Raymond Chandler, who published his first story there in 1933, as well as Erle Stanley Gardner, Raoul Whitfield, Dashiell Hammett—who introduced the Continental Op, an archetypal detective who never reveals his name, in October 1923—and the now largely forgotten Paul Cain, whose brutal, jazzy 1933 novel, Fast One, reconfigured Southern California crime fiction with a bang. “As Kells went through the door,” Cain writes in an early chapter, “the Captain said, ‘Where were you last night?’ Kells turned. ‘I was drunk. I don’t remember.’” The exchange recalls a line from Hammett, who in his 1930 novel, The Maltese Falcon, insists, “I distrust a man that says when. If he’s got to be careful not to drink too much it’s because he’s not to be trusted when he does.” Both moments are bleakly funny (cynical humor is among the genre’s hallmarks), but even more, both stake out a worldview in which hope, or even memory, is unreliable and betrayal lurks at the heart of every conversation, every interaction, every exchange or confrontation with the world.

For all noir’s roots in the 1920s, the 1930s were its first golden age. In 1934 and 1936, that other Cain, James M. (a failed screenwriter and former managing editor of the ), published his first novel, , and serialized his second, —not just genre masterpieces but also among the finest American fiction, period, of the decade. Horace McCoy presented murder as an act of compassion in (1935), set at a Santa Monica dance marathon. What such works share, not unlike and , is an existential outlook: a sense of the universe as a lost place, desperate, where bad things happen and people are taken advantage of—or worse, take advantage of themselves. “They spoke quickly, as though they were saying things that scalded their mouths, and had to be cooled with spit,” Cain writes in 1941’s —not a noir, but noir-inflected—describing a couple splitting up. “Indeed, the whole scene had an ancient, almost classical ugliness to it, for they uttered the same recriminations that have been uttered since the beginning of marriage, and added little of originality to them, and nothing of beauty.”