Talk:Noir fiction

WorldCat Genres
Maximilianklein (talk) 23:42, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Not the detective?
This is the first I've heard that noir fiction that "the protagonist is not a detective, but instead either a victim, a suspect, or a perpetrator". Guy Noir and Garrison Keillor would be surprised to hear that. Let's look at how readers use the term.

Goodreads' page of Popular Noir Fiction Books, as categorized by readers is currently topped by these books
 * 1) The Big Sleep: detective Philip Marlowe
 * 2) The Maltese Falcon: detective Sam Spade
 * 3) Farewell, My Lovely: detective Philip Marlowe
 * 4) Double Indemnity: insurance agent Walter Huff
 * 5) The Black Dahlia: police officer Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert
 * 6) Night Has a Thousand Eyes: John Triton, a nightclub fortune teller who suddenly develops a real psychic ability... and "all of his relentlessly bleak predictions prove accurate"
 * 7) The Killer Inside Me: Lou Ford, a deputy sheriff but also a cunning, depraved sociopath with sadistic sexual tastes
 * 8) A Swell-Looking Babe: Dusty Rhodes, who is working as a bellboy to raise enough money for medical school
 * 9) [The Hunter (Stark novel)|The Hunter]: Parker, a professional criminal, specializing in armed robbery
 * 10) The Thin Man: Nick Charles, a former private detective, and his clever young wife, Nora

Totals: Four detectives, plus a police officer: call it 4½. (#7 doesn't count for this one, but #10 does.) Five non-detectives, including #7, and the police officer: 5½. Looks like a pretty even division. Noir is not non-detective. Please me to discuss. --Thnidu (talk) 03:59, 18 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Good post. The sole source for the absurd claim about the protagonist definition is a fan made homepage, which doesn't by any definition meet the criteria for being a WP:RS. I would delete the claim outright, but we are then left with the problem of the lack of a proper definition, which should be based on a reliable secondary (in this case preferably scholarly) source for it. This page seems to be close to being such a source, although a monography on the genre would be better, and it is difficult to extract a concise definition from the text on the page. --Saddhiyama (talk) 09:44, 18 June 2015 (UTC)


 * I don't think a course syllabus should be used as a source. There isn't much currently in this article that is actually backed-up by anything in the References section. This article should say what the term was originally coined to describe followed by the qualities that lead critics to label something 'noir fiction' (ie. there's no hard line definition). From A Dark-Adapting Eye: Susanna Moore, Jane Campion, and the Fractured World of Postmodern Noir. By: Hodgkins, John. College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies Fall 2012, Vol. 39 Issue 4, p46-68.: "For despite the frequency and laxity with which the term pops up in our critical and everyday lexicons, the term has, historically speaking, been notoriously slippery. Numerous film and literary scholars have pondered over the years whether noir represents an independent genre or simply an aesthetic philosophy, and whether it suggests a specific thematic and narrative content or merely a set of distinctive stylistic codes. James Naremore succinctly crystallizes this definitional dilemma when he posits that there is "no completely satisfactory way to organize the category" ... However, amidst these persistent differences in classification and characterization, there have emerged a few points on which most students of noir can agree. As a critical appellation, noir finds its origins in the phrase roman noir, or 'black book,' applied by French critics of the early 1940s to the brand of 'hard-boiled' crime fiction pioneered by American writers like James M. Cain and Dashiell Hammet. In the mid 1940s the term was adopted by film critics, in the expression film noir to describe a series of contemporary American crime movies that were distinguished by their brutality, moral ambiguity, and sexual tension, movies that borrowed both storylines and attitudes from what David Madden calls the "tough guy novels" of the 1930s. More recently, in more common parlance, noir has come to connote a marked darkness in theme and subject matter, generally featuring a disturbing admixture of sex and violence, accompanied in films by a correspondingly shadowy or chiaroscuro mise-en-scene and in novels by a spare and unsentimental prose style."(p47) --maclean (talk) 17:43, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Rewrite / Update
I've been working on this one off and on since October. The main thing I wanted to do, besides adding cites in general, was to help solidify the distinction between hardboiled detective fiction and noir. The existence of film noir, which is primarily a visual style, has confused the issue greatly in the minds of the average public (the Guy Noir parody, referenced earlier, is a clear example of the resultant confusion). This film genre has "noir" in the title, but started out primarily adapting hardboiled detective novels, conflating the two for most people, since far more have seen a film noir than have read a noir book. As this is an article on literary fiction, it's important to make a proper separation between the world of film and the world of writing. I think any real fan of the stuff understands the distinction, but encyclopedias are not written for fans.

Along these lines, I've worked to avoid secondary sourcing and pop-culture stuff (especially newspapers, unless interviewing people close to the real thing) and added a number of quotes from writers, publishers, and academics actually working in the field, chosen specifically to not just define noir, but to highlight the differences between hardboiled and noir. If it seems that there's too many along those specific lines, I'd argue that the prevalence of confusion over what separates the two, including on this Talk page, highlights the need to repeatedly be specific; the pop-culture definition is so prevalent that just one instance might be dismissed as an idiosyncratic definition (again, as per the earlier Talk discussion). Palindromedairy (talk) 16:17, 23 July 2020 (UTC)