Tag: hardboiled

Any Man of Mine

Work at home Friday, with a meeting on-line this morning and a doctor’s appointment and errands to run later. The low tonight is in the high forties, which means it’ll be a bit chilly in the Lost Apartment tomorrow morning, and Sparky might just want to cuddle in bed rather than getting me up to feed him. I am hoping to have a good and productive day today, but we’ll have to see how things go, won’t we? It is chilly this morning, and Sparky let me stay warm and comfy and sleeping in bed for an extra couple of hours, which is super nice. I do feel a bit physically tired this morning, but mentally I feel recharged. We’ll have to see how that lasts. I was a bit tired when I got home last night, so didn’t do any chores. I worked on a short story for a bit, clocking in about a thousand words on it, which felt great, and I also watched this week’s Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, and caught up on the news some, too.

It’s also Friday the 13th, the last day of Mercury in retrograde, and I do think that calls for some episodes of Friday the 13th the Series today, doesn’t it? After I get back from the doctor and errands, I’ll go sit in my easy chair doing quality assurance while the show plays. Needless to say, the serendipity of this is enormously pleasing to me and that side of my brain that likes full circle moments. The apartment also needs cleaning, so that’s a goal for the weekend–I never quite make it to cleaning the floors every week, but with everything else already caught up, I just have to empty the dishwasher and do the bed linens while working at home. I’d like to work on the short story and the next chapter of the book some today–I’d love to complete the story draft by Monday–and it feels like whatever that crud I’ve been fighting with for the last week or so is finally over; I woke up with no congestion and no coughing, which is marvelous. I wonder if the overnight temperature drop had something to do with it? The air has been damp ever since that big rain when I drove back from Baton Rouge. The high today is 67, which is lovely, and I am hoping to be able to take a walk a little later; just down to the park and back, just to get started, and maybe even do some calisthenics this weekend–and stretching.

I also am going to watch this week’s The Traitors at some point today, too. I am really feeling great this morning, maybe it was the extra sleep, maybe it was the cold, who knows? But I am going to embrace it and not ask any questions. I keep feeling scattered and disorganized with my life these days, so hopefully I am going to figure out how to organize everything and stay on top of things the way I used to–the anxiety meds aren’t helpful in that regard, LOL; maybe some anxiety is necessary for me to function, I also want to get back to reading and talking about true crime/non fiction this month. I think I am going to start my reread of In Cold Blood this weekend, too.

I am going to do Hardboiled Holidays for December, in which I’ll be reading noir and hardboiled crime novels for Christmas, as well as watching/revisiting some films like Body Heat, Mildred Pierce, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, and some other classics. It’ll also give me a chance to do my snarky review of It’s a Wonderful Life as a truly dark hardboiled movie, and maybe some other Christmas classics, like Charlie Brown and Rudolph.

And on that note, I’m going to get another cup of coffee and maybe make a little breakfast so I can shower before my meeting at ten. Have a lovely Friday the 13th, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back bright and early and chilly tomorrow morning! See you then, and as always, thanks for stopping by!

On the Dark Side

Someone recently pointed out to me that on my website, I described my Chanse MacLeod series as more nourish, but a hilarious typo—which either no one noticed previously or had but were too polite to mention to me— made the sentence read as the Chanse series is more nourish. Yes, it made me laugh for a few moments before I went in and corrected it, but it also made me start thinking about the sentence itself. Is the Chanse series, in fact, more noir than the Scotty series?

 

The Chanse series is darker than the Scotty series, and yes, that was a deliberate choice, but calling the Chanse series noir is probably incorrect; what I should have said was the Chanse series was more hardboiled. That would be factually correct. So, what precisely is the difference between hardboiled and noir?

 

Hardboiled crime fiction is a bit easier to define than noir, and it is possible for a novel or story to be both. Wikipedia says this:

 

Hardboiled (or hard-boiled) fiction is a literary genre that shares some of its characters and settings with crime fiction (especiallydetective stories). Derived from the romantic tradition which emphasized the emotions of apprehension, awe, horror and terror, hardboiled fiction deviates from that tradition in the detective’s cynical attitude towards those emotions. The attitude is conveyed through the detective’s inner monologue describing to the audience what he is doing and feeling.

The genre’s typical protagonist is a detective who witnesses daily the violence of organized crime that flourished during Prohibition(1920–1933) and its aftermath, while dealing with a legal system that had become as corrupt as the organized crime itself.[1]Rendered cynical by this cycle of violence, the detectives of hardboiled fiction are classic antiheroes. Notable hardboiled detectives include Philip Marlowe, Mike Hammer, Sam Spade, Lew Archer, and The Continental Op.

 

Interesting that Wikipedia doesn’t define it as a subgenre of crime fiction, but defines it as its own genre, separate but sharing characteristics with crime fiction. It also claims that the notion of hardboiled fiction is limited to a specific time period. I don’t think that’s true; I would go so far as to say that there are many authors who are publishing hardboiled crime fiction today. It’s only my opinion, but I do think one could consider Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, Ace Atkins, Reed Farrel Coleman, and many others as practitioners of the form.

 

Noir, on the other hand, is a more slippery kind of fish to define. Film noir and literary noir, for example, are completely different things; the classic movie is considered film noir, but the novel itself, to me, is hardboiled; Spade is a cynic but he is not a bad guy. When I was asked to write a story for New Orleans Noir, the assignment, as defined by the editor, was to come up with a description for noir and write a story that fit that definition. My definition was the endless nightmare; for me, noir was about an everyday Joe who makes a bad decision—something amoral or immoral, maybe against the law—and that bad decision sets he/she on a path where things get worse, and the only choices presented from that point on sink the character deeper and deeper into the quagmire of an amoral abyss. To that end, I wrote the story “Annunciation Shotgun”.

I never really felt, though, that my definition was adequate; it scratched the surface, but it didn’t go deep enough to truly define noir. Of course, Laura Lippman defined noir on a panel I was on perfectly: dreamers become schemers. As always, the woman who is often the smartest person in the room nailed it, and I have since stolen that as my definition.

I love noir, both the film and literary versions of it. James M. Cain is one of my favorite writers, and I have always wanted to write a noir novel. I have a couple of ideas, and as always, it’s simply a matter of being able to find the time to sit down and actually write one. I want to read more noir writers; modern day genius Megan Abbott is one of our best writers and her novels are extraordinary. The closest I’ve come to a noir with my novels are Timothy and Dark Tide;

I have a couple of other ideas, as I said, that I may explore. I know how both start, but there’s that slight issue of the plot yet to work out. Once I have a better grasp of the plots, I’ll start writing them.

And on that note, it’s back to the spice mines.