Fatal Men

Abstract

Killer protagonists proliferate in the post-World War Two noir thriller: revenge-seekers, criminally inclined social climbers and scornfully superior psychopaths, these ‘fatal men’ derive from earlier noir character types, all of them being in some measure victims seeking to become active agents and taking on the qualities of the punitive investigator, the gangster or the murderer. In these later narratives, however, the focus is less on the determining force of adverse economic circumstances than on society’s demands for conformity. The pressure towards conformity shapes the behaviour of some protagonists, particularly that of the upwardly mobile murderer, and is challenged by others — the revenge figure and the psychopath. In Horace McCoy’s 1948 novel, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, the psychopathic gangster protagonist makes explicit the difference between the way pre- and post-World War Two narratives allocate guilt. He argues that his college education and Phi Beta Kappa key demonstrate that he should not be used, in literature or the movies, ‘as a preachment’ on the theme of socio-economic determinism:

… it proves that I came into crime through choice and not through environment. I didn’t grow up in the slums with a drunk for a father and a whore for a mother and come into crime that way. I hate society too, but I don’t hate it because it mistreated me and warped my soul. Every other criminal I know — who’s engaged in violent crime — is a two-bit coward who blames his career on society (235).

Ralph Cotter’s speech is the ranting of a megalomaniac, but it also exem-plifies a significant shift in the kind of explanatory framework to be found in the noir thrillers of this period.