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Many writers believe that genre labels are a bad thing. Why be shackled to the tag of western writer or crime writer or romantic suspense writer or steampunk-bizarro-urban pastoral writer when you can just be a writer?

Part of me agrees. It’s always good to keep ’em guessing. Then again, genre labels can be useful.

As Georges Simenon explained over 80 years ago: “There are maybe ten or twenty literary genres, which are like the various sections of a department store in that they exist only by tacit agreement between seller and buyer,” he said. “Each category has its own rules, which commercial honesty forbids us to violate.”

As a teenager, I understood and appreciated this. I was a card-carrying horror junkie, and wanted an easy way to get my fix.

Did the book have a predominantly black cover? Or a die-cut reveal of a possessed demon child? Perhaps even something so crass as the word HORROR running just below the publisher’s logo on the spine? If so, my $4.50 was yours! I was queasy at the sight of my own blood yet worshipped at the altar of the so-called “Splatterpunks”—Clive Barker, David J. Schow, John Skipp & Craig Spector and Joe R. Lansdale.

But of course these writers didn’t limit themselves to horror; Lansdale, for example, wrote whatever the hell he wanted, producing westerns and private eye tales and crime novels. I picked up Lansdale’s Cold In July one hot morning in the summer of 1990 and had an instant revelation: Damn, this “crime” stuff is just as thrilling as the horror stuff I’d been reading!

Another genre switch in my brain was flipped: from now on, I’d go to bookstores seeking HORROR and CRIME. Eventually this list would expand to MYSTERY and SCI-FI and God help me, even SERIOUS LITERATURE. But around 1990, my brain became hard-wired for crime, baby, crime.

And since then, I’ve had three great teachers who helped me navigate its mean streets.

One day in 1994, on a lunch break from my job as a magazine fact-checker, I wandered into a used bookstore in downtown Philadelphia and met my first: store co-owner and mystery novelist Art Bourgeau. “Guys like you want to read about bad blondes in the middle of the afternoon,” he’d say, plucking vintage paperbacks from the cramped shelves and dropping them into my grubby mitts. James M. Cain. David Goodis. Jim Thompson. Chandler and Hammett. I devoured them all.

My second great teacher was Geoffrey O’Brien. I’ve never met Mr. O’Brien, but I can’t underestimate the importance of his book Hardboiled America, which provided me with brilliant history of the genre I’d come to love. I studied that book like some people study the I Ching. His suggested reading list in the back of the book was my shopping list for the next five years.

And my third great teacher? Well, you’ve just downloaded his book.

I’ve never meet Woody Haut, either. But Neon Noir and its predecessor, Pulp Culture (which you need to purchase immediately, along with related volume Heartbreak and Vine: The Fate of Hardboiled Writers in Hollywood) were just as important in my development as a fledgling crime writer.

I know I purchased Neon Noir in early March 1999, because the Shakespeare & Company shelving sticker on my copy is dated 3/01/99, and I haunted that place bi-weekly and there’s no way I wouldn’t have picked it up immediately. Come on, it had the words CRIME and NOIR on the cover. (I’m that easy.)

By the time I encountered Haut’s book, I was more than a fan. The previous summer, I'd written the first draft of my first novel, Secret Dead Men, an attempt to fuse the genres I loved (HORROR, CRIME, MYSTERY, SCI-FI) into something novel length. So I approached the pages of Neon Noir the way a new surgeon might consult a medical textbook. Eager for the knowledge; a little worried I may have already killed the patient with something I didn’t know.

And if I’m perfectly honest about it, Haut’s work kicked my clueless Polish ass.

Unlike Art, who made friendly suggestions like a high school English teacher, or Geoffrey O’Brien, who took me on an undergraduate-level tour through the streets of mid-century America, Haut’s take on American crime fiction was grad school bursting with big ideas that went far beyond biography and publishing trivia. Here, Haut shows us the ugly mug of 20^th century America—its politics, its wars, its business practices, its social crisis—through the prism of its crime novels.

This may seem obvious looking back on it, but at the time it was a huge revelation: crime novels were the perfect vehicle through which to examine modern life.

Perhaps I suspected this from the beginning? In my early, swooning days of reading Chandler, I knew I wasn’t there for the plot. I wanted to know what Philip Marlowe was drinking, eating, and thinking about. David Goodis was my portal to an earlier time in my hometown. The whodunit stuff? Eh, that was fine. But you could find serviceable mystery plots on Murder, She Wrote. Crime fiction—and specifically its subgenre, noir fiction—afforded me glimpses into worlds I’d never dare venture into alone, or ones I couldn’t touch because they were long gone or beyond my reach. They were big and dangerous and they meant it.

Neon Noir quickly became an essential guide that illuminated the work of writers I was already reading (Charles Willeford, James Ellroy, Thomas Harris), sent me scrambling for writers I hadn’t read yet (Newton Thornburg, Robert Stone), and uncannily predicted what I’d be reading later in life. (I didn’t discover the insane delights of Jim Nisbet, for instance, until 2006.) Haut’s books forever altered how I look at the genre and approach it.

Which is why I’m thrilled that the Haut’s PULP NOIR HARDBOILED trilogy is finally available in eBook form. Not that I’d ever dream of getting rid of my print copies, but I like the idea of having them on my phone, accessible at an instant. I’m still learning, and thanks to Haut, school is always in session.

Duane Swierczynski

February 2014

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INTRODUCTION: SKIP-TRACING THE CULTURE

Criminal incongruities; locating the evidence; selling the genre

Item: December 7, 1996. Crime writer Eugene Izzi is found dangling from the window of a fourteenth storey office block in Chicago. He is wearing a bullet-proof vest; in his pockets are a set of brass knuckles, a tear gas canister, notes referring to telephone threats from a militia group, and three computer disks containing, according to police, “writing consistent with the prose of a crime writer”. The doors are locked from the inside and an unfired gun is on the floor near his desk. Witnesses say it looks like a scene from one of Izzi’s novels. While the media speculates on whether it was suicide or murder, rumours that the disks contain the story of a crime writer found dead after being pursued by members of a secret Indiana militia go unconfirmed.
Item: January, 1997. Believing his wife, Margo, is involved in a lesbian relationship with crime writer Patricia Cornwell, former FBI counter-espionage agent, Eugene Bennett, enters Margo’s Methodist church in Manasas, Virginia, and takes the pastor hostage. Margo arrives and, though an expert in interrogation and hostage crisis situations, comes close to shooting her husband. At the trial, Eugene insists it was Ed, the other half of his personality - split through decades of state deceit — who committed the crime. He maintains that, after confronting Margo with evidence of her relationship, she mocked him and asked why it had taken so long to find out. Meanwhile, in Cornwell’s Hornet’s Nest, the police chief, Judy Hammer, has also tired of her dull husband: “[He] was so much like a spineless, spiteful woman that his wife wondered how it was possible she should have ended up in a lesbian relationship with a man.” Hornet’s Nest is part of a three book deal for which Cornwell was paid $24 million.
Item: Having, by his own admission, used the murder of his mother to achieve notoriety as a crime writer, James Ellroy writes a non-fiction book which he hopes will atone for his past exploitation. My Dark Places concerns Ellroy’s past life, his mother’s death and his unsuccessful attempt to track down her murderer. Having in the past created fictional characters — including several based on his mother — who interact with the famous and infamous, Ellroy must now create a real character and piece together a plot which can stand alongside his past fictionalisations.
Contemporary crime writers, seeking to replicate life at street-level, have created a genre whose predominant artifice is its apparent lack of artifice; consequently, the line separating fiction and reality has become increasingly blurred. The origins of this anomaly might well be located in the political lethargy, cover-ups and crimes that followed the Vietnam war. Prior to the 1970s, crime fiction seldom sought such simulation. Raymond Chandler’s amorphous depictions of LA are, however evocative, parodies of the culture. While Chester Himes admitted that the Harlem he portrayed was, in the end, a product of his imagination. Even Jim Thompson, whose work accurately depicts the internal thoughts of twisted psychopaths, would never have suggested his work replicated reality.

So common has such simulation become that few crime writers can expect to exert the same impact as Newton Thornberg, James Crumley, George V. Higgins and James Ellroy, who, in the mid to late 1970s, emerged with novels seemingly so authentic as to reinterpret the national narrative. This obsession with verisimilitude, from George V. Higgins’s off-centred dialogue to Andrew Vachss’s descent into the world of child exploitation, requires one to reappraise the genre’s relationship to the culture. Consequently, contemporary noir fiction, often vicarious and voyeuristic, can be read as quasi-anthropological texts, or as narratives evoking prurient interests; descriptions of what America has become, or chapters in a survivalist’s handbook. Despite a handful of writers preoccupied with the poetry of violence or the grand gestures of everyday life, the genre continues its drift towards simulation, extremism and confession. As a character in James Crumley’s One to Count Cadence puts it, “Art deceives as well as history; Life imitates Art as often as Art does Life; History seems to have little connection to either one.”

Locating the Evidence

To examine a culture, one need only investigate its crimes. Thus the fictionalisation of crime has become a favourite pastime and a means of analysing society. A popular and often lucrative genre, contemporary crime fiction addresses the social contradictions and conditions of a decaying society. In personalising the political and politicising the personal, crime fiction takes the temperature of a culture obsessed by paranoia, hooked, as it were, on packageable insights, instant replays, soundbites and various post-mortem proddings.

Neon Noir concerns crime fiction from the mid-1960s to the 1990s. Following on from Pulp Culture, it places the genre in a political perspective, reading the era alongside particular authors and texts. Yet Neon Noir makes no attempt to be a definitive history of contemporary crime fiction. As in Pulp Culture, the writers included in this study reflect the author’s personal tastes. Positioning themselves on the furthest reaches of the literary establishment, the writers, many of whom are part of the tradition of the literary worker — that is, those who must work to contract — include some not normally associated with crime fiction. Consequently the likes of Robert Stone (Dog Soldiers) and Michael Herr (Dispatches) — whose work has influenced contemporary crime fiction — will be discussed alongside James Ellroy, Richard Stark, Sara Paretsky, and Elmore Leonard.

Meanwhile, conspicuous by their absence, are best-selling authors like Scott Turow, Tom Clancy and John Grisham, who, in search of the lowest cultural denominator, are neither hardboiled, nor inheritors of the pulp culture tradition.

The book is entitled Neon Noir for two reasons. One, because the term implies a predominantly urban genre; and, two, because it suggests an electronic culture consisting of half-lit signs adorning cheap hotels, the sound of crackling synapses induced by hallucinogenics and the war in Vietnam, the power of the media, and the flash of self-promotion as crime writers hammer out stories on the frontage of the information superhighway.

Neon noir writers are descendants of such hardboiled pulp culture writers as Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Charles Williams, and Dorothy B. Hughes. Emerging from the maelstrom of the 1960s, neon noirists would be deeply affected by the Vietnam war and the political atmosphere surrounding it. Dividing the nation, the war instilled an atmosphere of paranoia, a condition exacerbated by government secrecy, inflexible policies, and the effect of drugs on the political consciousness of numerous dissidents. In the following years, the Watergate investigation and congressional hearings regarding the role of the CIA would confirm public suspicion about government duplicity and corruption, and contribute further to the forging of noir narratives as paranoid as the era from which they derive. Accordingly, writers like Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke and Lawrence Block, having worked in other genres — westerns, lowlife fiction, science-fiction, softcore porn — produced narratives which investigate the relationship between public and private crime. Striving for realism and accessibility, their work is typified by a straightforward prose style, tinged, in many cases, with vernacularisms and a dark and irreverent humour. Battling the bottle, drug-addled, or beaten down by society, neon noir protagonists are no longer wisecracking know-it-alls, but psychologically scarred inhabitants of a morally ambiguous world in which people are capable of perpetrating any and every outrage.

Neon noir fiction would also be affected by the Reagan-Bush era’s obsession with deregulation and privatisation. Such policies would contribute to a corresponding deregulation and privatisation of the genre, as well as its investigative process. Beginning in the early 1980s, noir texts were suddenly content to distort and even disregard past rules concerning narrative voice, plot and subject matter. In following a path of privatisation, crime fiction also became more personalised, as concerned with the protagonist’s journey and battle against the forces-that-be as with solving crime. Portraying the effects of deregulation and privatisation — social inequality, corruption, violent crime and a culture driven to extremes by the era’s cut-throat economics — noir fiction’s narrative grew more dispersed, while its investigation of crime remained unconnected to any specific political perspective. This populist approach appealed to readers feeling increasingly powerless in a society saturated by street and state crime, whether muggings, drive-by killings, insider dealing, or foreign invasions. With the continuation of such crimes, post-Vietnam war crime writers like Ellroy, Higgins and Jerome Charyn, would, in turn, influence another generation of noirists. The likes of Jack O’Donnell, and George Pelecanos, schooled on noir fiction, film and TV, would regard violence as part and parcel of urban life. Interpreting the culture along formalistic lines, their writing, though referring to past noir styles, continues to push the boundaries of crime fiction to greater extremes.

The two generations — one having witnessed the war and the culture surrounding it and the other having, in some instances, noted the era in retrospect — rely on a common reality: a culture of violence stimulated by the push and pull of the free market. Accordingly, both would prove popular with readers seeking narratives capable of recreating a recognisable world. This despite the fact that few readers are likely to be victims of the kind of crime they encounter in their fiction. Yet their paranoia — induced by cultural disparities and media sensationalism — is such that they seek out narratives that replicate that part of the culture they most fear. Depicting the culture at its most excessive, crime fiction walks a thin line between criticising the culture and numbing its readers with rollercoaster narratives whose politics have yet to be articulated.

With advertisements distorting him into a lone survivor inhabiting a dangerous urban landscape, the noir protagonist has become a marketable commodity. More Die Hard than Thin Man, one notes this new breed of noirist — young, white and stylishly dressed - swaggering past rappers and winos, or dancing with svelte black women in ghetto nightclubs. Possessing perfect instincts, he is, despite the chaos surrounding him, in control of his life, the territory and the narrative. The consummate consumer, he is a means of self-empowerment in an age of neon powerlessness. Not content to stay in the present, this mock-noirist has even been chased into the future, inhabiting sci-fi films — whether Blade Runner, Total Recall or Strange Days — and speculative fiction simulating films and novels that only exist in the minds of those who passively consume such products.

Meanwhile, their more legitimate counterparts, unlike pulp culture protagonists, are as likely to appear in hardback as in cheap paperback originals or mass market editions. After all, paperback publishing, which, during the late 1940s, heralded the possibility of a literate nation, has, since the early 1960s, ceased to be politically contentious. To most readers, paperbacks merely represent an economically accessible form of literary product, the politics of which is rarely questioned. Though paperback publishing as a commonplace phenomenon is not without significance, its effect has been lessened by the excesses of mass culture. Meanwhile, some noirists, realising the contradiction entailed in profiting from novels that depict crime and violence, have suggested that their writing might, in itself, be a confidence trick, if not an illicit activity. Veteran crime writer Ed McBain has half-jokingly said, “Writing a commercially successful novel comes high on the list of white-collar crime”, while K. C. Constantine, putting the role of the crime writer in another perspective, has written, “[Is] there any doubt that a storyteller is society’s stoolie?”

So commodified and populist has the genre become that, when asked about his reading habits, Bill Clinton named Walter Mosley as his favourite author. In doing so, the President went some way towards single-handedly reducing the power of crime fiction to function in a subversive manner. Given the Great Comforter’s propensity for poll-mongering, one suspects that Clinton’s choice had more to do with cultural correctness than literary acumen. Yet, if Clinton, given his politics, reads Mosley, one could be forgiven for questioning whether the latter can be said to occupy a position on the cutting edge of noir fiction. Certainly Mosley’s novel, A Red Death, which depicts the McCarthy era, remains, on the surface, oddly non-political. Though Clinton and Mosley are products of the same generation, one wonders how someone rarely outside the corridors of power could understand the nuances of an oppositional genre, or appreciate the subtlety of Mosley’s fiction. After all, the political thrust of post-Vietnam war noirists has been, at the very least, to critique the dominant narrative and reclaim the genre from the pseudo-Chandlerites; not to join the literary or political mainstream. However, Clinton’s pronouncement, if nothing else, indicates the extent to which crime fiction can appeal to a cross-section of the population, from ordinary punters to credibility-seeking Presidents.

Selling the Genre

While writers such as Charles Willeford and Chester Himes were able to make the transition from pulp culture to neon noir fiction, the likes of Jim Thompson, Charles Williams and David Goodis were less successful. One reason for their failure was that they came from a period in which ambiguity offered a degree of protection against McCarthyism. In general, pulp culture fiction, with its contractual and cultural constraints, could not contend with the confrontational politics of the 1960s. A class-based literature — primarily oriented towards working-class readers — it had literally lost its class. Readers either expected more or were subsumed by the promise of prosperity and slicker forms of escapism. Nevertheless, the era ended with some excellent critiques, the most notable of which might be Willeford’s The Woman Chaser. Summing up the hesitancies of the pulp culture era, its protagonist senses the nation’s changing narrative, saying, “Some of my story is too personal to write in the first person, and some of it is too personal to write in the third person. Most of it is too personal to write at all.” Thus Willeford’s character speculates not only on whether to simulate reality, and, if he chooses to do so, the voice in which he will speak, but, in a more general way, on the relationship between author and protagonist. Significantly, two years after the publication of The Woman Chaser, Willeford’s Cockfighter would appear. In this novel written from the perspective of someone who has chosen not to speak, Willeford formally acknowledges the genre’s shift in perspective and, parodying unfriendly witnesses, silent majorities and strong silent types, bridges the narrative chasm separating the two eras.

If it wanted to survive, noir fiction had little choice but to meet the demands of the era, readdress itself to state crime while continuing to investigate human foible, fear, and a world in which, to paraphrase Ross Macdonald, the hunter and the hunted are often indistinguishable. These days readers have come to expect uncertainty, deviancy, moral ambiguity, iconoclasm, and a narrative suggesting cultural and psychological fragmentation. Nor are readers, after Watergate, Irangate, the Savings and Loan scandal and the Gulf War, easily shocked when it comes to state crime. Aware of the trajectory of contemporary life, and the fact that the guilty often escape punishment, few expect fictional crime narratives to neatly resolve themselves in the traditional manner. Writers as diverse as Andrew Coburn, who writes with subtlety about East Coast suburban crime, and Jerome Charyn, whose Jewish grand gesture fiction centres on New York, constantly subvert expectations with plot twists and outrageous resolutions as open-ended as their investigations. Referring to subjects and signs with which earlier crime writers would have been unfamiliar, neon noir writers continue to represent life in an increasingly fragmented and corrupt society.

Given the era’s policies and the pursuit of excess at any cost, a proliferation of crime novels appeared in the 1980s. The corn-modification of the genre, along with chronic inflation, meant that crime fiction would invariably over-price itself, while crime writers, not wanting to alienate potential readers, would refrain from political reductionism. This resistance to political categorisation suggests that writers no longer believed the language and ideologies of their predecessors capable of addressing contemporary issues. Preferring to leave himself open to interpretation, James Ellroy, for example, would refer to himself as an extreme right-winger, yet write about the Hollywood witch hunts from what could be called a left-wing perspective. This resistance to categorisation also points to the influence of economic considerations on the contents and packaging of noir fiction. After all, the business of crime fiction, like any such enterprise, is based on hype, which, in turn, functions as the conceptual engine of a consumer culture. Appealing to all ideologies simultaneously, corporate publishing absorbs contradictions, while encouraging — though never at the expense of profit — the depoliticalisation of that which it produces. Regardless of volume, format and price, neon noir fiction threatens to become as expendable as its pulp culture predecessors. Yet this has a positive aspect; for noir fiction, existing within a historical and cultural context, rarely pretends to be anything other than what it is: expendable product whose appeal extends no further than replication and critique. With crime fiction so easily commodified, corporate publishers and the media adjust their response to the genre, creating demand through supply, a circular process that begins and ends with the market and its manipulation. These days, every crime novel is a possible movie, and every author is a would-be celebrity. Consequently, some authors, to protect themselves, choose to take the most extreme position possible.

Neon noir fiction, which could be said to begin with Richard Stark’s Point Blank, reaches its apogee with James Ellroy’s White Jazz. After Ellroy’s fragmented assault, the crime novel would have to reassess its place in the culture. For Ellroy’s work suggests that crime fiction is at its most subversive not when it retreats into the confines of the genre, but when it stretches its narrative boundaries and rules regarding subject, style and plot. With its historical resonances, White Jazz mirrors the last days of the Reagan-Bush era, and, in doing so, becomes the quintessential noir product. “The last word in atrocity, cynicism and horror”, wrote Andre Gide in reference to Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 Red Harvest. He might just as well have been referring to White Jazz. But times change. These days, Hammett is the epitome of good taste, while Ellroy has become the most recent example of extremism in pursuit of vice.

The chapters that follow cover a variety of subjects and a number of writers. The first four chapters place neon noir fiction in a historical context, while the last two investigate specific themes. “From Pulp to Neon: Searching for the war in the wreckage of pulp culture fiction” addresses itself to writers seeking to make the transition from pulp culture to neon noir fiction. Starting with the Vietnam war — conspicuous by its absence in noir fiction during the 1960s — the chapter explores how the genre would reflect a divided nation. “Total Crime: Negotiating the memory of Vietnam” considers the aftermath of the Vietnam war, the Nixon era, Watergate, and the Congressional hearings on the CIA. In doing so, it discusses the genre’s changing subject matter and readership, as well as the war-as-crime narrative. “Figures in the Mirror: Private-eye fiction from Watergate to Whitewater” deals specifically with detective fiction and its role in investigating the culture. It follows the rise and fall of post-Watergate fiction and its relationship to history in a post-pulp culture era. “Extremists in Pursuit of Vice: The origins and practice of deregulated crime fiction” looks at the genre against the backdrop of the Reagan-Bush era, and obsessions with serial killers, racial division, class warfare, and the apparent breakdown of society.

“From Mean Streets to Dream Streets: The portrayal of cities in contemporary noir fiction” discusses crime fiction in relationship to the cities in which it takes place. Considering how urban space has changed over the years, it focuses on three cities: Los Angeles seen through the fiction of Ellroy, Arthur Lyons, Walter Mosley, and Joseph Wambaugh; Miami via the fiction of Elmore Leonard, Charles Willeford and Carl Hiassen; New York through the fiction of Jerome Charyn and Nick Tosches; and the imaginary contemporary city through the work of Jack O’Connell. Here one notes that Utopias have become dystopias, the stalker has replaced the flâneur, and public spaces have become zones of paranoia and repression. The final chapter, “Turning Out the Lights: Post-mortem aesthetics; the politics of murder in the work of Thomas B. Harris and Bradley Denton; pastiche noir; and the future of crime fiction” widens the discussion and draws the main body of the study to a close. Given that crime fiction and film are so closely linked, Neon Noir ends with “Screening Neon”, which lists and comments upon examples of modern film noir as they relate to the fiction discussed in the preceding chapters.

Though neon noir fiction reflects the warp and woof of society, it rarely does so to the point of negating the inner workings of the genre or of exposing itself to political categorisation. While most contemporary noirists maintain a firm grip on the moral centre of their fictional world, others demonstrate a more flexible relationship. Responding to a crime-ridden, economically extreme, and morally uncertain culture, the latter carve out narratives that manoeuvre between fiction and replication, self-reference and artifice. It’s these critiques to which Neon Noir pays particular attention.

Contents

Acknowledgements

My Back Pages

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