For the first issue of Noir Nation, we invited crime writers Melodie Campbell, Wendy A. Reynolds, Ann Littlewood, Ann Cleeves, Linton Robinson, and Joe Trigoboff to share fresh thoughts on an old question: Must crime fiction have a moral point? The following are their responses.
Do you agree or disagree with their views? Share your own thoughts in the comments section at the end.
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Don’t Preach at Me, Even From a Distance by Melodie Campbell
As the General Manager of Crime Writers of Canada, I have to justify daily our penchant for penning devious, grim and gruesome novels and short stories.
Why do we do it? What is the purpose? Twenty years in the business has given me this perspective: We do it to entertain. Literary fiction pummels us with moral philosophies. The newspapers daily cry outrage at bad politicians, financial buccaneers and world despots. Religious tomes tell us how to behave.
Is there anywhere we can go for pure entertainment without commentary? Yes! Crime noir fiction.
The very thought that genre fiction and crime noir fiction in particular must teach us something fights against its primary purpose: to entertain. In my view, anything that steps in front of this goal should be cast out on the River Styx.
Fiction allows readers and writers to play with the concept of being someone else for a time. We get to experience another person’s desires and motivations, if only for a little
bit. Put me in the body of a killer in noir fiction! Let me experience the focused greed of the con man or woman. Dress me up as a torch singer with a black heart and a revolver in her stocking.Take me out of my own world for a while.
That’s the purpose of noir fiction. It provides a leap in the dark, away from our
world. A marvelous read that allows one to escape into something romantic, unexpected and maybe even vile. Something that makes us say Wow at the end.
Entertain me! Don’t preach at me even from a distance. Save that for nonfiction venues. In crime noir fiction, nothing should stand in the way of entertainment, and the telling of a really good story.
That’s what it’s all about: a good story.
Melodie Campbell, General Manager of Crime Writers of Canada, has been a banker, marketing director, comedy writer, college instructor, and runway model. Author of the comic time travel novel Rowena Through the Wall, she has over 200 publications, including 30 short stories, to her credit and five awards for fiction.
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Crime Must Have Consequences by Wendy A. Reynolds
While the best crime noir is steeped in sex, violence and exaggerated realism—there’s no room for romance that isn’t tawdry, no place for arguments that don’t lead to someone eating a knuckle sandwich or being “pumped fulla lead”—the fact remains that, in order to bring closure to a good story, there must be a ‘comeuppance’ of sorts. Because the protagonist is tied directly to the crime, we need to have them directly or indirectly face the consequences of their actions to feel our engagement in the story was worthwhile. Victims must be exonerated in some way, even if just by having their murder solved. Suspects must either be cleared or found guilty. And perpetrators must pay, even if in an ambiguous way. Noir might not need to be tied up in a neat package with all plot lines squared away and the bad guys lying in a pool of blood, but it does need to show in some way that the story ended, and that crime does have consequences.
Well-crafted noir lets the forbidden play out in all its violent, degrading glory. We want to see the femme fatale’s skirt ride up over voluptuous hips. We want to hear the footsteps coming closer in the alley. That first spurt of blood has a metallic taste when the private dick punches the palooka in the jaw, and we want it to be sticky when it dries on the pavement, attracting flies from the rusty garbage cans. We want to feel the red-hot
bullet pierce the skin, the thrill of adrenaline as the heist plays out, the kick in the gut as Johnny lies curled in the fetal position, his vomit sticking to his cheek. But the only way all of this can make sense is for it to be reconciled morally at some point. Otherwise, this sensory overload is gratuitous and ultimately pointless.
Don’t get me wrong—gratuitous sex and violence is not necessarily a bad thing. But it is not crime noir. Crime noir presents plenty of juice, electricity and moral ambiguity along the way—and at the end, will bring home the message that rules are there for a reason. You can bend them, sure. But when they snap, someone’s gonna pay.
Wendy Reynolds is a writer, editor and proofreader in Buffalo, NY. Published in The New York Press, the Village Voice and several online literary magazines, she is the copy editor for The Martin Group, a branding and advertising firm in Buffalo.
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Awareness of Values Doesn’t Mean You Have to Play Nice by Ann Littlewood
Can crime fiction avoid having a moral point? Or if not a point, at least moral assumptions? I doubt it. Our culture, childhood, education, work experience, and so on, create our assumptions about the world, including our moral landscape, and we draw from this well when we write fiction. Read fiction from a previous era and note the author’s depiction of poor people, women, and people of color, of war or business or politics, and the moral judgments show up. That writer may have seen these judgments as commonplace facts, but a more distant eye can see the moral underpinning. It’s harder to see in our own time and our own writing (“inspirational” fiction excepted), but it’s there because that’s the way our brains work.
Some writers talk about morality like it’s a bad thing. And it can be, all preachy and thick-witted. I think our best bet is awareness, noticing our moral assumptions as best we can when we develop characters and story arcs.
Awareness of values doesn’t mean you have to play nice. A writer can still celebrate protagonists who don’t give a rip about right or wrong, justice or honor, or who live within their own peculiar definitions of these. Noir, anyone?
But let me ask, dear author, why wouldn’t you include a subtle moral point or two in your fiction? It’s a ton of work to write a novel. We want them all to be best-sellers—lots and lots of people reading our work. Why would you pass up the opportunity to weave in whatever you believe might make the world a better place? Isn’t that part of telling the truth through lies?
One way to go about it seems to be to immerse the reader in a world they wouldn’t encounter otherwise. Motherless Brooklyn (Jonathan Lethem) and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Mark Haddon) offer sympathetic insider perspectives on mental health issues. Sara Paretsky and Laura Lippman both tackle economic and racial injustice. In his Dr. Suri series, Colin Cotterill works in the otherwise inexplicable attraction communism has to Laotians.
I like finding something worth chewing on. Sure, it can be too heavy-handed. Anything can be done poorly. But done well, a moral issue or two adds some heft to a book. It respects the reader as someone who can be trusted to think.
As for my own zoo mysteries, morality abounds. The traditional: crime doesn’t pay, justice will be served. The conventional modern: a woman can be powerful and successful against evil. The offbeat: animals should be respected for what they are, not for the stories and expectations we choose to lay on them. And, yes, the heavy-handed: stop wrecking the natural world (this means you) or kiss a comfortable future good-bye. Take a look and let me know how the representation of these values sits with you.
Ann Littlewood worked as an animal keeper at the Oregon Zoo for 12 years. A nursery
keeper, she reared a wide variety of mammals and birds. She left the zoo for a career in corporate America as a technical writer and publications manager. Now she writes mysteries and short stories. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and a dog. She is active in the Audubon Society of Portland and other similar organizations. She writes the Iris Oakley “zoodunnit” series—Night Kill (2008) and Did Not Survive (2010), both from Poisoned Pen Press. She has also published short stories in Scandinavian women’s magazines.
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It is Not Easy to Know What is Good and Right by Ann Cleeves
I grew up reading the Golden Age novels of Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham. In those books the moral standpoint is fixed and clear. Murder is evil and the detective (in both cases upper class by birth, incorruptible and fearless by character) brings order to the world at the end of the book. Of course it’s easy for Wimsey and Campion to be incorruptible: they’re rich, and have the confidence that comes with being a part of the British aristocracy.
Should these authors be considered at all in a piece about Noir? Aren’t their books the forerunners of all those cosy mysteries so despised by readers of the hard-boiled? In The Tiger in the Smoke I believe Allingham has created a novel that has the tension and atmosphere of a contemporary thriller. This is 1950s London after the ravages of war and out of the smog emerges Jack Havoc, a psychopathic villain to rival the serial killers of today. Sayers’ characters are less monstrous and indeed Gaudy Night isn’t really crime fiction at all, but there is something truly scary about being killed, tied inside a bell tower, while the huge church bells ring all night—the cause of death in Nine Tailors.
So if the Golden Age provided my first experience of crime fiction, do I share its certainties and moral perspective? No. The world brought to order at the end of these books is itself unjust and we’ve lost the easy assumption that we know what is good and what is right. When I worked as a probation officer, the offenders I met were a product of their upbringing and their communities; they weren’t born monsters.
We can’t tie up all the loose ends of a book and feel safe again. Our sense of morality shifts and changes in an uncomfortable way and depends on the point of view of the characters we create. Life is less easy but much more interesting. And so is the crime fiction we read.
Ann Cleeves is an award-winning crime writer who sets her books in Shetland and
Northumberland. Her Northumberland novels have been adapted for television under the series title VERA, starring double Oscar nominee Brenda Blethyn. DVDs will be available in the U.S. in August 2011.
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Noir Heroes Don’t Uphold Moral Codes, They are Their Victims by Linton Robinson
The very sources and origins of noir are deeply rooted in worlds in which morality as such doesn’t really apply or is at best irrelevant. That existential or even nihilist sensibility is as important to the genre as chiaroscuro B&W or lipped Galouises. Noir heroes do what they have to do, not what they’re supposed to do. They don’t uphold moral codes, they are victims of them, are destroyed by them.
We’ve come to think of noir as a 1950s thing, a Raymond Chandler thing. Internet lists name Jim Thompson and James Ellroy but ignore the rich lodes of books and films and detective magazines from the 1930s and—ironically, given the noir title—French and European sources. Certainly The Blue Angel and films from that whole school did as much to define the genre as Hammett or Cain, not to mention French films of the Pepe
Le Moko stripe that point towards writers like Gide and Celine, about as noir as it gets. The whole critical concept that noir fiction is an American invention is suspect—and limiting. Americans might not be as simplistic as Puritans, but it’s a country where, for instance, cops on the take are seen as anomaly—and a bad thing—rather than standard operating procedure as in most countries.
Noir work depends on moral relativism at best, and embrace nihilism, amorality, and ambiguity at a moment’s notice. The moral compass swings closer to Greek tragedy, where flaws lead the protagonist to evil and doom, or the Shakespearean versions where a Macbeth can do wrong and repent, but a Richard III can exult in doing evil for its own sake: not unlike Fantomas or Dr. Phibes. But can Greek drama work without gods to offend? Can Shakespeare work without Christianity? The image of man in a dark, weightless moral space is much truer to the wellsprings of real noir sensibility. There is little moral advice in absurdity, and even less in the struggle to survive in spite of it.
A revealing American ploy to resolve darkness with righteousness is the amoral sidekick. No Watsons here: Easy Rawlins’ sidekick Mouse, or Spenser’s friend the Hawk are quite capable of killing on the spur of the moment, of grisly punishments and greedy rewards. But this is a literary Jekyll and Hyde trick, allowing the thrill of running amok without the Good Guy getting his skirts muddy. If Easy and Mouse, or Spenser and Hawk, were one person: where would the moral merit badges attach? A full examination of the word noir calls into question what moral point it could champion.
Linton Robinson is an award-winning fiction writer and journalist, whose noir column, Flesh Wounds, was syndicated throughout the western states in the 1990s and recently re-appeared as an e-book. His novel, Sweet Spot, is about crime, Mexican politics, Carnival, and baseball. He is also author of the recently released novel, Mayan Calendar Girls.
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Noir is not about morality but about personal codes by Joe Trigoboff
In the movie Shane, Alan Ladd, a gunslinger and killer for hire, becomes attached to a family of homesteaders and risks his life to save them. During High Noon, Fred Zimmerman’s parable about the McCarthy era, Gary Cooper finds he can only count on himself to face a group of outlaws. As frightened as he is, he confronts them. His moral code will not let him run away.
From Euripides to Shakespeare, people who watch or read need to have someone to root for. The central question for a writer has been how to define good and evil. The most talented are skilled enough to combine good and evil in their main characters.
The detective novel, the successor to the western, is no different. In the works of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain, heroes may have their own codes of behavior. Chandler and Hammett’s detectives consider themselves moral people. James M. Cain’s grifters usually fail in their schemes. In the more recent work of James Elroy, cops may be corrupt, but like Bud White (a police character in L.A. Confidential) they are made sympathetic by their personal codes.
My three favorite crime novels are True Confessions (John Gregory Dunne), The Hoods (Harry Gray), and The Godfather (Mario Puzo). In True Confessions, the two main characters are brothers. After one brother destroys the other’s episcopal aspirations, they reconcile. Their moral codes will not allow estrangement. In the 1950s, Harry Gray wrote the outstanding crime novel of the decade. We root for his Jewish group of killers and accept their definition of morality, which is loyalty to each other and pride in their Jewish heritage, because Harry Gray has made their slum come alive for us. The Godfather shows us the patriarch and members of a powerful mafia family. Despite their crimes, we find them sympathetic because we accept their narrow moral code: the family comes first.
In real life, I personally knew many members who would later be portrayed in Goodfellas. Anthony Stabile hated blacks and Puerto Ricans, but unlike many in his street gang, was not anti-Semitic. In the mid-1960s, when he impregnated a woman, he dutifully married her. Foxy (Ronald Jerothe) who was one of John Gotti’s closest friends, limited his crimes to his Gambino family. Away from the mafia, he was extremely friendly, kind, and never a bully. Tommy DeSimone, the worst of them, was devoted to his younger brother and sister. Stanley Diamond, one of the Jewish members of the crew, was never a rat and a loyal friend. Perhaps the reason we are intrigued by crime fiction is because each of the characters we root for has a well-defined sense of morality.
Joe Trigoboff is a novelist living in New York City. His novel The Bone Orchard, published by The Lyon’s Press, was a selection of the Book of the Month Club. The Shooting Gallery, its sequel, was well received by the New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus, and many others. He is currently working on a memoir about his street fighting in East New York. Mr. Trigoboff and be reached by e-mail by clicking here.