Abstract
The lonely protagonist of mid-century noir is often left running blindly or wandering aimlessly, as isolated at the end of his narrative as he was at the beginning:
He ran on … plunging into the wastes of endless land and sky, stretching forever. … Blindly he stumbled on.
Dorothy Hughes, Ride the Pink Horse (1946)
And later, turning the street corners, he didn’t bother to look at the street signs. He had no idea where he was going and he didn’t care.
David Goodis, Black Friday (1954)
… I left the shelter of the awning and walked up the hill in the rain. Just a tall, lonely Negro. Walking in the rain.
Charles Willeford, Pick-up (1967)1
Transients, drifters, escapees from a past of fear and guilt — these are protagonists living at the margins, outside of respectable society or unable to return to a home that is as they left it. The places in which these characters find refuge are themselves marginal, unstable and threaten-ing. In the film noir of the period, this pervasive feeling of rootlessness is often linked to the post-World War Two problems faced by returning soldiers, who struggled to achieve readjustment and reintegration intofamily and society.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For example, The Blue Dahlia (George Marshall, 1946) confronts the veteran Johnny (Alan Ladd) with loss of home due to his wife’s unfaithfulness and with suspicion and pursuit. In Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire (1947) four soldiers on furlough are dangerously adrift in a world ‘too used tofightin’ (Sam Levene in Crossfire, quoted in James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998], p. 114). See also Michael Walker, ‘Film Noir: Introduction’, in Ian Cameron (ed.), The Movie Book of Film Noir (London: Studio Vista, 1992), pp. 35–6.
Nelson Algren, in David Ray, ‘Walk on the Wild Side: a Bowl of Coffee with Nelson Algren’, The Reporter, 20 (11 June 1959), pp. 31–3,
quoted in James A. Lewin, ‘Algren’s Outcasts: Shakespearean Fools and the Prophet in a Neon Wilderness’, The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, 18 (1991), p. 107.
Albert Camus, quoted by Robert G. Porfirio, ‘No Way Out: Existential Motifs in the Film Noir’, in R. Barton Palmer (ed.), Perspectives on Film Noir (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1996), p. 126. The presence of existential motifs can be seen to unify films noirs as diverse as Maltese Falcon, Detour, Brute Force and Woman in the Window. See Porfirio, in Palmer, Perspectives, p. 117.
John M. Reilly (ed.), Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystety Writers (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1980, 1985), p. 935.
Eric Lott, ‘The Whiteness of Film Noir’, American Literary History, 9, No. 3 (1997), p. 551, quoting Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, Introduction to The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 1989), p. xix.
See also Evelyn Gross Avery, Rebels and Victims: the Fiction of Richard Wright and Bernard Malamud (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1979), pp. 3–4.
Liam Kennedy, ‘Black Noir: Race and Urban Space in Walter Mosley’s Detective Fiction’, in Peter Messent (ed.), Criminal Proceedings: the Contemporary American Crime Novel (London: Pluto Press, 1997), pp. 42–8.
Gilbert H. Muller, Chester Himes (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989), p. 21.
Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward (eds), Film Noir (London: Secker and Warburg, 1980), pp. 241–3.
Nicholas Blincoe, ‘British Hardboiled’, in Nick Rennison and Richard Shephard (eds), Waterstone’s Guide to Crime Fiction (Brentford, Middx.: Waterstone’s Booksellers Ltd, 1997), p. 13.
More Deadly Than the Male is the only novel that Chase wrote under the name of Ambrose Grant; the argument that Greene had a hand in it is advanced by W. J. West, The Quest for Graham Greene (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997), pp. 113–15.
Sy Kahn, ‘Kenneth Fearing and the Twentieth-Century Blues’, in Warren French (ed.), The Thirties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama (Florida: Everett/Edwards, Inc., 1967, 1976), p. 133;
Julian Symons, Bloody Murder, From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: a History (London: Pan, 1972, 1992), p. 181.
Philippe Gamier’s biography of Goodis, Goodis: La Vie en Noir et Blanc (Editions du Soleil, 1984), quoted in James Sallis, Difficult Lives: Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Chester Himes (New York: Gryphon Books, 1993), pp. 54–5 — discussing the response of the French to Goodis’ existentialist qualities. See also Reilly, p. 385: ‘Goodis is recognised in France as a master of the roman noir Americain second only to Woolrich.’
Bill Pronzini and Jack Adrian (eds), Hard-Boiled: an Anthology of American Crime Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 340–7 (quotation from p. 345).
See the arguments of Woody Haut, Pulp Culture and the Cold War (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995), p. 142.
Schuyler’s Ethiopian Murder Mystery was serialised in the thirties and reprinted as a novel in 1994; Paula L. Woods, Spooks, Spies and Private Eyes: an Anthology of Black Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction of the 20th Century (Edinburgh: Payback Press, 1996), pp. 36–45, reprints ‘The Shoemaker Murder’, which Schuyler originally published in 1933 under the name of William Stockton.
Wright wrote a dust-jacket blurb for Jim Thompson’s grim, naturalistic Now and on Earth (1942), hailing it as ‘an accurate picture of what happens to men and women in our time’, and it is worthwhile to consider parallels between the two. Mark J. Madigan, ‘As True and Direct as a Birth or Death Certificate …’, Studies in American Fiction, 22, No. 1 (1994), pp. 105–10.
Wright, ‘The Man Who Killed a Shadow’, reprinted in Woods, p. 103. Wright’s very influential Native Son (1940) also, of course, develops its racial theme through a melodramatically noir plot. See Ian Walker, ‘Black Night-mares: the Fiction of Richard Wright’, in A. Robert Lee (ed.), Black Fiction: New Studies in the Afro-American Novel since 1945 (London: Vision Press, 1980), pp. 11–28.
Stephen E. Milliken, Chester Himes: a Critical Appraisal (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976), p. 212.
See Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Vintage, 1990), pp. 42–3, on the brief appearance of ‘Black Noir’ in Los Angeles in the forties.
Michel Fabre, Robert E. Skinner and Lester Sullivan (compilers), Chester Himes: an Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992), pp. 151–3.
Some otherwise good studies of Himes give misleading analyses of the relation between Himes’ work and that of earlier noir/hard-boiled writers because of this tendency to define the existing tradition in too limited a way: see Robert E. Skinner, Two Guns from Harlem: the Detective Fiction of Chester Himes (Bowling Green State University Press, 1989);
Stephen F. Soitos, The Blues Detective: a Study of A fro-American Detective Fiction (Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1996);
James Lundquist, Chester Himes (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1976).
Fabre et al., Annotated Bibliography, p. 162; James Sallis, ‘In America’s Black Heartland: the Achievement of Chester Himes’, Western Humanities Review, 37, No. 3 (1983), pp. 191–206.
David K. Danow, The Spirit of Carnival: Magical Realism and the Grotesque (Lexington, Ky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1995), pp. 39–40.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2009 Lee Horsley
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Horsley, L. (2009). Strangers and Outcasts. In: The Noir Thriller. Crime Files Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230280755_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230280755_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-21886-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-28075-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)