Victims of Circumstance

Abstract

Both the hard-boiled investigator and the career criminal have the kind of masculine competence that enables them to achieve some degree of mastery in a hostile world, however temporary and limited it might be. Even Harry Fabian, though he is in most respects a failure, can, like Rico or Scarface, be compared to counterparts in the world of business, gifted with energy, perseverance and enough nous to enable him, in his small way, to thrive: ‘He was not quite an ordinary person: he had highly developed intuitions, proceeding from long cumulative experience of the customs of the City’ (21). He knows what he is doing, and is single-minded in the pursuit of his own interests. Like most other criminal protagonists, he will end as a victim, but he will at least have put up a plausible fight before becoming a casualty in the conflict. In many noir thrillers of the period, however, the protagonist is a victim throughout, one of the uninitiated who has acquired neither the special competence of the private eye nor the underworld knowledge and sharply focused survival instincts of the seasoned criminal: ‘and then,’ says one of Horace McCoy’s narrators, ‘I said something to myself I had never said before (but which I now knew had always been in the back of my mind): I should have stayed home.…’ (142). The cover of this McCoy novel, I Should Have Stayed Home (1938 — see Figure 3), catches exactly the sense of resignation and defeat so often felt by the characters in his novels.