The Dark Side: Studying Noir

 What makes noir...noir?

Despite appearances, I am still writing. It has been a bit slower the last two years due to a prolonged health issue, major cross-country move, and days working with our garden, rabbits, sheep, and farm life in general. Additionally, I'm working on multiple WIPs at once. 

I started a new series on Ivy Leake, a young widow and mystery writer who, of course, stumbles onto mysteries as she travels the country with her 16-year-old son, River. It is intended as a bit of a nod to, or light parody, of noir.

As I finish my most recent draft, I considered more carefully what makes a story noir rather than merely a detective novel. The fedora goes without saying! But the rest? I found the answer, from AI, very educational and a good tool by which to assess just how noir The IHOP Affair really is. A book that is noir will contain at least 10-12 of the following elements.

1. Moral ambiguity
   Almost nobody is clean. The detective is flawed (alcoholic, crooked past, sleeping with the wrong people), the client is usually lying, the cops are on the take, and even the “good” characters have dirty hands.
2. A protagonist who is doomed or damaged from page one
   They may not die, but they’re already scarred—by war, betrayal, booze, guilt, lost love, or all of the above.
3. Fatalism / Existential bleakness
   The universe is indifferent or actively malevolent. Justice is a fairy tale. The case is usually solved, but the victory is hollow or Pyrrhic.
4. First-person narration (or very tight third)
   Classic noir is told in a hard, sardonic, world-weary voice full of cigarette metaphors and one-liners.
5. Urban rot
   Rain-slick streets, neon reflecting in puddles, cheap bars, flophouses, corrupt city hall, crooked unions, back-alley gambling joints. The city itself is practically a character—and it’s diseased.
6. The femme (or homme) fatale
   A seductive, treacherous love interest who is almost always the engine of the plot’s disaster.
7. Betrayal as the central engine
   Someone the hero trusts sells him out—partner, client, lover, best friend, even himself.
8. Money as the root of everything ugly
   Greed is usually the motive: insurance scams, blackmail, embezzlement, rigged fights, stolen payrolls, crooked real-estate deals.
9. Cynical, poetic, metaphor-heavy prose
   “The night was the color of a fresh bruise,” “Her smile was a .38 with the safety off,” etc. Chandler-style similes are practically a requirement.
10. Violence that is sudden, intimate, and unglamorous
    Beatings in alleys, a sap to the back of the head, pistol-whippings, bodies dumped in the bay. No extended gun-fu scenes.
11. Ordinary people destroyed by one bad decision
    Noir is less about master criminals than about regular Joes (or Janes) who step over the line once and spend the rest of the book sliding into the gutter.
12. A tone of erotic danger
    Sex and death are never far apart. Desire is almost always fatal.
13. Corrupt or impotent authority
    The police, the courts, the politicians, the rich—every institution is bought, broken, or indifferent.
14. Night and shadows dominate
    Most scenes happen after dark, in smoke-filled rooms, under flickering street lamps.
15. The ending leaves a bad taste
    Even when the mystery is “solved,” the protagonist is poorer, more cynical, more alone, or dead. Happy endings are outlawed.

[Not the final cover, but close]

It has been a great tool, too, to decide how to apply some of these aspects to a story about a widow and her 16-year-old son that takes place in the small town, population 450 (452 by the end of the book!) rather than in a gritty city where none of the people of the town are truly evil.

Do I really want to add a femme (or homme) fatale in the middle of a mother-son story? That doesn't seem to fit.

However, the more I considered these questions and read up on some of the great noir authors, I saw that they can each have these elements, but in very different ways. Yes, the book is set in a mostly wholesome small town--yet it has a strip club, the Sholda Smolda. The people here have all the normal human failings, jealousies, vanity, cheating, dishonesty, and tempers that get them in trouble.

I realized there is a bit of a femme fatale in Alabaster Saginaw, the young morning cook at the IHOP who River is very drawn to. And she does have her own secrets, including why she's slipping into the IHOP late at night.

I'm very much looking forward to going through this next draft deciding how much to highlight some of these elements a bit more.

What do you think? What makes noir noir? Who are your favorite noir authors?

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