February 4, 2005
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
The New Noir, Not Always by Men or by Americans
By MARGO JEFFERSON

Noir is the perfect example of how a popular form goes classic. Video stores devote shelves to noir films. Theaters mount sold-out festivals; we crowd in and cheer at the first sight of those terse, lurid titles on-screen: "Double Indemnity," "Naked City," "I Wake Up Screaming." Playwrights, poets and performers create noir characters and scenes. We read novelists like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Jim Thompson - once deemed pulp - in respectable Library of America volumes.

The best television drama still thrives on noir traditions: cities that are corrupt from top to bottom, law officers as cynical as the criminals they pursue, people driven by greed (for money, power, sex), and a pervasive sense that everyone has hidden motives and nothing is what it seems. "Law & Order," with its clockwork plots of social and psychic blight that end bleakly or ambiguously, has entered rerun eternity. The tales of multilayered corruption and complication in "The Wire" make repeat viewing both necessary and pleasurable. (George Pelacanos, one of the best contemporary noir novelists, writes for "The Wire." So does flashy Dennis Lehane, whose pre-"Mystic River" thrillers were his best.)

In the 1980's, the small, resourceful Black Lizard Press began reissuing noir novels of the 40's and 50's in all their pulp glory: small volumes on thin paper with steamy, stylized covers that seemed to say: "I'm a piece of lowlife memorabilia. Don't pass me by."

In 1990 Vintage bought Black Lizard; its first reissues were upscale and sleek. Now, Vintage has reissued a much bigger selection of these books in their original formats, both famous and obscure. You may know titles like "Shoot the Piano Player," but what about "The Damned Don't Die"?

It seems noir is busting out all over. But why now? Ann Douglas, professor of literature at Columbia University, is writing a book about the form called "Noir Nation." As a genre, noir took off in the late 40's, she said, adding,"Its golden age coincided with the first 10 years of the cold war and of the U.S. as an openly imperial power." Its resurgence is hardly accidental now, she said, when conservatives talk about a new kind of war between good and evil and reclaim America's right to be an empire.

"Noir is a critique of power," Ms. Douglas went on. "It operates on Balzac's premise that every great fortune is the result of a great crime. Power and money are ugly and they rule. You enjoy it but you don't forget it." At the very least, noir offers an alternate reality - moments of real passion, a bleak code of honor, and a need for freedom amid corruption. At its best, noir offers a map of subversion.

Noir was a brainchild of the United States. And most of the creators of classic noir - novelists and screenwriters, directors and cameramen - were men. Women were their mysterious, sometimes villainous, always seductive objects of desire. It should be no surprise, then, that in the 1970's female writers started creating female detectives with the cynical integrity of the classic men. (One of the first of these writers, Marcia Muller, remains one of the best.)

Right now, though, some of the best writers of modern noir come from outside the United States - Sweden's Henning Mankell, for instance, whose Kurt Wallander mysteries move from local and national politics to global economics and (in Ms. Douglas's phrase) "transnational psychopathy."

Some of the most original writers of this imported noir are women. Noir has always shown that greed and chaos are as close as the company we work for or the politicians we vote for. The best female writers are adding families to that list - with a vengeance. And if male writers have explored the eros of violence, these women explore the violence of eros.

I found a telling remark that seemed to foreshadow this trend in "Detour," one of the few classic noir tales by a woman. In this clever 1953 novel by Helen Nielsen, a burly, thickheaded law officer sneers, "This is a sheriff's office, not a court of human relations."

But noir is a court of human relations, and some crimes are beyond legal restitution.

In the Scottish writer Denise Mina's forceful trilogy ("Garnethill," "Exile," "Resolution"), Maureen, the central character, is an alcoholic; a working-class underachiever in Glasgow, fighting the legacy of a sexually brutal family.

Glasgow is also the city of noir brutality in Louise Welsh's sinister "Cutting Room." As a drug dealer observes, "You know, Glasgow imports more baseball bats than any city in Britain, and there's not a single baseball team in town." The narrator is a witty, dissolute gay man of 43 named Rilke, who works in an auction house. While assessing the estate of a rich Glasgow merchant, Rilke comes across pornographic photographs that suggest a young woman has been killed in the making of a snuff film. Unsure of his own motives, he decides to find out.

Ms. Welsh is such a good writer she can afford leisurely scenes that give us the texture of Rilke's life but don't help solve the mystery. Why should they? This isn't how life works. It is Ms. Welsh's elegantly edited version of how a noir unfolds in real time.

Two of the best female new-noir novelists I have read are Japanese: Miyuki Miyabe and Natsuo Kirino give us an underworld that has moved quietly above ground. In this quotidian world no one is heroic: not the criminals and not their pursuers. Men and women get equal time as objects of desire and menace.

Both writers take the full measure of Japan's boom-bust economy of the 1980's. In Ms. Miyabe's coolly harrowing "All She Was Worth," money is the engine of lust: mergers and scams have turned consumers into addicts. Everyone borrows, some steal and a few kill. Her new novel, "Shadow Family," will be published this month: it involves a husband and father who creates a second, altogether different family on the Internet.

Ms. Kirino's "Out" has just been published in paperback by Vintage, and it is superb. It begins on a factory line where women assemble box lunches. Four are part-time night shift workers; by day they are hardworking, unhappy homemakers. When one kills her husband in a fit or rage, the others band together to hide the crime.

Sisterhood? More like the desperate need for money, and for the ringleader, Masako, a desperate need to break free of her life. Masako is a fascinating character: stern, relentlessly smart; a crime-solver and a criminal. Ms. Kirino writes of Masako's growing solitude: "When stones lying warm in the sun were turned over, they exposed the cold damp earth underneath, and that was where Masako had burrowed deep. There was no trace of warmth in this dark earth, yet for a bug curled up tight in it, it was a peaceful and familiar world."



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