Noir Fiction and Film

The argument of Noir Fiction and Film is curiously counterintuitive: that in a century of hard-boiled fiction and detective films, characteristics that at first seemed trivial swelled in importance, flourishing into crucial aspects of the genre. Among these are aimless descriptions of people and places irrelevant to plot, along with detectives consisting of little more than sparkling dialogue and flippant attitudes. What weaves together such features, however, seems to be a paradox: that a genre rooted in solving a mystery, structured around the gathering of clues, must do so by misdirecting our attention, even withholding information we think we need to generate the suspense we also desire. Yet successful noir stories and films enhance that suspense through passing diversions (descriptive details and eccentric perspectives) rather than depending on the centerpieces of plot alone (suspected motives or incriminating traces). As the most accomplished practitioners have realized, the “how” of detective fiction (its stylistic detours) draws us in more insistently than the “what” or the “who” (its linear advance). The achievement of recent film noir is to make that “how” become the tantalizing object of our entire attention, shorn of any pretense of reading for the plot, immersing us in the diversionary delight that has animated the genre from the beginning.

A “Burlesque Queen in Bobby Socks”: Domesticity, Criminality, and Suspense in Charles Williams’s Noir Fiction

This article proposes that Charles Williams’s mid-twentieth-century noir fiction reshapes post-war representations of gender roles and paves the way for various renditions and developments of noir. Williams’s works are narratives of transgression meeting domesticity, crime meeting docility, and cunning meeting conformity; they portray a deadly recipe that comprises different, even conflicting ingredients of a fusion between domesticity, crime, and suspense. By examining the recurring figure of the criminal housewife in his work, especially Hell Hath No Fury (1953), this article argues that Williams brings forth a complex and subversive gender schema to trouble both the creed of domesticity popular in the 1950s and the stereotyping of the lethal seductress prevalent in noir fiction. By so doing, Williams’s noir not only brings the transgression of women to the fore but also displays a compelling picture of post-war gender roles in the US under McCarthyism.

Welty’s Moonlighting Detective

This essay argues that Eudora Welty’s 1966 civil rights story, “The Demonstrators,” casts a spotlight on the “crime” of systemic racism in the U.S. South through the popular crime genre of American noir fiction and film. Although a mid-twentieth-century category mainly recognized for its depictions of dark cities and shadowy “mean streets,” noir’s stylized world collides with the Closed Society in Welty’s late story and throws into stark relief the subtler effects of white supremacy. Turning noir’s key traits on their head (e.g., black-and-white chiaroscuro lighting, the femme fatale, and the tropes of hard-boiled detective fiction), Welty throughout “The Demonstrators” brilliantly illuminates the subtle tactics of, and clues left behind by, criminalized acts of whiteness. In so doing, Welty’s masterful crime story pays homage to classic noir artists such as Dashiell Hammett, Chester Himes, and Alfred Hitchcock.

A Fairy-Tale Noir: Rewriting Fairy Tales into Feminist Narratives of Exposure

This article introduces the fairy-tale noir, a subgenre of fantasy-noir fiction that is particularly present in the work of Italian women writers, including Laura Pugno, Simona Vinci, Nicoletta Vallorani, and Alda Teodorani. This subgenre adopts fairy-tale topoi and characters to elaborate on the theme of vulnerability from feminist and environmental perspectives. Vulnerability is an intrinsic feature of fairy tales (texts that are continually performed and modified, but that remain “non-appropriable”); it is also a pivotal characteristic of the young protagonists of these fictional universes, who are often exposed to abuse. The twenty-first-century fairy-tale noir redeploys the discourse of bodily exposure typical of traditional fairy tales by engaging in an environmentalist reflection on the experience of exposure that human and nonhuman bodies share. The genre also adopts the theme of vulnerability as openness to change and uses the unconventional families of fairy tales to discuss recent social changes in Italian families. Finally, fantasy noir recasts vulnerability to violence as a potential space of empathy, or biophilia, with the broader, nonhuman “family.” Exploring this overlooked genre ultimately shows how Italian women writers, who are still at the margins of the Nuovo Giallo Italiano, have successfully reinvented a male-dominated genre into a literary lens probing socio-environmental concerns, first and foremost gender discriminations.

SHIFTING NOIR ELEMENTS: AN OVERVIEW ON NOIR FICTION IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

The emergence of noir fiction in Southeast Asian countries has showcased particular evolvement of noir elements. The noir works produced in this region have embraced shifting noir themes and noir protagonists that slightly move away from what formerly constitutes noir fiction. Thus, this study aims at investigating to what extent these two noir elements from noir fiction produced in Southeast Asia has differed from its preceding noir works in the scholarship of noir genre. As a preliminary finding, this study only highlights the shifting noir elements taken from selected noir stories represented by some noir anthologies produced in Southeast Asia. They are KL Noir from Malaysia, Singapore Noir from Singapore, and Manila Noir from the Philippines. The result shows that noir themes have departed from criminality and violence to some other contextualized themes such as supernaturalism, religion, and colonial legacy. Meanwhile, noir protagonists are portrayed as those who are involved with criminality not only as criminals but also as ‘heroes’. Finally, what is discussed in this study is expected to contribute to a larger discussion of fluidity in noir genre, and, also, noir, or darkness, is proven to be derived from various perspectives.

Murders in Shocking Pink: Women, Love and Desire in Rossana Campo’s Noir Fiction

This article analyzes Rossana Campo’s Mentre la mia bella dorme (1999), Duro come l’amore (2005) and Il posto delle donne (2013) in the context of Campo’s work in general, showing how her use of crime genre conventions is specifically designed to reveal flaws and pitfalls inherent in romance narratives. By establishing a complex dialogue between noir and rosa, and by offsetting both traditions with female protagonists who question in different ways the heterosexual paradigm, Campo’s crime novels occupy a unique place in her production, especially in regard to the representation of female desire.