Noirer
Think black. Got it? Now imagine painting an all black picture. Easy enough. Now think "noir", and imagine writing a piece of noir fiction. All you need is a cynical protagonist in a bleak world full of people with unmet needs and the selfish determination to try to meet those needs using any degree of fraud and violence. Dashiell Hammett did it in San Francisco. Raymond Chandler did it in Los Angeles. And then it was Katy, bar the door as countless American, and other, writers took to the darkling plain of the noir novel. Unfortunately, Katy didn’t bar the door very well, as most of the noir epigones when they went to put their over-testosteroned selves on fictional display turned out to be notably under-endowed. Fictively speaking, of course. Still they come, or try to, as the overflowing shelves and remainder tables of your nearest Barnes and Noble testify. Most of it’s weak, weak stuff: formulaic, predictable. Capon bantam roosters strutting and crowing in a fake-front barnyard whose metaphysics are about as complex as the questions on a "millionaire" TV show. What happened? Hammett and Chandler did it so well, and today almost all our guys are doing it so poorly. Oh sure, they sell millions of copies—but who’s buying and reading their diarrhetic effluvia? Only those who’ve been conditioned by TV and Hollywood to accept the theorem that big effects cancel all plot holes and clever gore met by efficient violence implies depth of character. As the proudly pious try to prove they are holier than thou, the lamely bleak try to prove they are noirer than thou. No need to name names. Just look at the nearest best-seller list. Oh well. Let’s name a few names. Now we have noir lite (Robert B. Parker), noir rich Republican (Patricia Cornwell), noir Boy Scout merit badge (Michael Connelly)… Why bother going on. The talent-challenged, no matter how financially rewarded, are best left to their petty fates at the bottom of the dustbin of literary history. Black is bleak, at least in fiction. Noir is nasty. But it’s nothing new. Hammett and Chandler put an American spin on a view of the world that’s been around since, well, Job. The nay-sayers we shall always have with us, and being a really good nay-sayer is just as hard as being a really good yea-sayer. The point of all this is to call your attention to somebody who is still practicing the noir trade, tossing of the occasional noir novel with masterful ease, much as Graham Greene took breaks from his "serious" fiction to write what he called entertainments. Mixed in the large, rich, varied body of work that Donald E. Westlake has produced in the last 40 years is the occasional pseudonymous novel by "Richard Stark," featuring the quintessential noir protagonist who goes only by the name "Parker." Parker is a gun for hire, but a very intelligent gun for hire, and one who only accepts as targets those whom he judges to be of no value to the world: the greedy, the violent, the vain, the slothfully rich, the insanely jealous, and so on. If your life is marked by an excessive form of any of the seven deadly sins, and you’ve made an enemy along the way who decides you need erasing and hires Parker to do it, it’s good-bye you. Not, you understand, that Parker ever talks about the "issues" behind his occupation. Westlake moves Parker through this perfectly noir world and lets us see things, events, and people as Parker sees them. No strutting, no preaching, no moralizing. Parker checks out each assignment, decides the world would be better off without the target, and that’s it. Of course, his primary aim—also never discussed because it’s not worth discussing—is his own survival and financial well-being. What redeems the Parker novels is Westlake’s skill as puppetmaster and creator of plots and plotters. Yes, there’s violence, but you won’t find Westlake pornographically dwelling on the gore the way best-selling mass market guys do. Yes, there’s sex but again kept at arm’s length. Like any good artist, Westlake works with an unforced economy of means: He tells a good story with just enough words, and no more. When the story’s finished, he stops (sometimes the ending of a Parker novel surprises you with its abruptness; then you think about it and realize there was no reason for even one more word). The seeds of macho exaggeration were present in Hammett and Chandler (who may well have gotten them from the misguided flouting of testicular reality by Hemingway), and those seeds have been taken and tended and germinated by lots of bad writers since. In the Parker novels, all that adolescent posturing has been stripped away: The world is black and bleak and noir and here, Westlake says, is somebody who has learned how to not only survive but to thrive in that world. Take it or leave it. No big deal. No fancy, strutting talk about grace under pressure. The only other writer who comes to mind who pulled off a similar bared-to-the-bone noir world was Patricia Highsmith, and she did it just about as well as Westlake does. The difference being: Highsmith dwelled only in darkness; but for Westlake, the desolate, beautifully wrought Parker books are only a small part of his output. The other books, including the remarkably plotted and peopled Dortmunder novels, are Parker with a terrific sense of humor. The tiny talents making so much money these days off faux noir can’t do more. They’re like bad pianists who can only play a few of the simpler Chopin preludes in a minor key. Westlake can play all 28 preludes in all the keys. Which of course is what real writers are supposed to be able to do. END
Here are
two of the Parker novels at Amazon: And here's
Patricia Highsmith at Amazon:
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