For people who write (and read) the hard-boiled/noir genres

[Rath Darkblade]

Hopefully I put this in the right spot, but if not, please feel free to move this.

If you read, or write, the classic hard-boiled (or noir, or more generally detective fiction) genres, I simply came across a website I'd like to recommend as reference: Thrilling Detective.

It's crammed full of useful information about your favourite authors and their books, biographies, adaptations of their work -- what you'd generally expect to find -- as well as unexpected treasures, like Essays and Articles, Authors' Wit and Wisdom (e.g. Frank Ryan's Golden Rules about how to write an Armed Robbery, or Robert B. Parker about how to write).

My favourite? Christa Faust's Ten Rules to Writing Noir. She distils it down to ten rules that apply not only to noir, not only to detective fiction, but to almost any genre. Recommended!

 

[wearywanderer64]

Thanks for this. I find when I cross-promote on Storyorigin this genre doesn't do very well. I'll take a look at it. Could be the Scottish slang though.

 

[Also]

@Rath Darkblade From the Christa Faust link:

Be a good writer. Learn your craft. Build up your chops. Because you can run the classic noir laundry list and hit all the genre sweet spots but if you suck, the book will suck. Period. Conversely, you can break every other rule on this list and then some and if you’re good, your readers won’t give a damn

[Emphasis mine]

Repeat after me:
Chandler = Hardboiled.
Cain = Noir.


Don’t make me explain this again.

I'm reading Cain's 1934 The Postman Always Rings Twice right now. I'm only 40% in, and was going to write about it later, but so far, after one attempted murder and one successful murder, I've been surprised at how gentle and tame the writing has been. To be sure, it's tonally quite a way from his blandly written 1941 Mildred Pierce (general back then, would be called literary today), but I'd read that Postman was scandalous at the time, even banned in Boston. (Great promotion, right?)

So far, the steamiest sex scene I've seen was two sentences:

I had to have her, if I hung for it.
I had her.

Cain knew it was "hanged" — I know this from who he was in RL and from much in his Mildred — but this is his idea of being noir before noir was even really barely a thing.

In Mildred, he used "drew" as a simple past and "drawn" as a past participle. In Postman, he used "drawed" as both. Other than that, the dialogue is a little bit snappy and clipped so far, but not a lot like either film version.

Postman is a quaint, pleasant read, but not an exciting one.

 

[Also]

Wow! Postman changed quickly, turning (a few pages after my previous post about it) a lot more hardboiled and complex and inventive, pitting its conspirators against each other and ending with two strong twists I didn't recall from the 1981 film version. I thoroughly enjoyed it, mostly for its surprises. It never turned very sexual, but he did write about being attracted to the smell of the antiheroine — and smell was the word he used, not scent or fragrance.

I'm going to rewatch both film versions.

 

[Rath Darkblade]

I also read "Postman", but I haven't seen either film version. I have to wonder what the title means, though: why "The Postman Always Rings Twice"? I'm puzzled.

 

[Naomasa298]

Hard-boiled, noir or pulp are specific subgenres that have their own aesthetics and construction, which aren't necessarily applicable across the whole crime genre.

If you're specifically talking about those genres, then learning how to write Agatha Christie or Conan Doyle isn't necessarily going to teach you how to write Stieg Larsson. It might teach you how to write a detective story, but not how to write a noir detective novel. If you're talking about detective fiction as a whole genre, that's different. It's important not to conflate the two.

The best way? Read the genre you want to write in.

 

[Also]

I also read "Postman", but I haven't seen either film version. I have to wonder what the title means, though: why "The Postman Always Rings Twice"? I'm puzzled.

As a title and a nugget of hardboiled wisdom, It was quite a stretch. In the B&W film version, the DA explains it to Chambers at the end: if justice doesn't get you the first time around (the murder he committed but got away with) it comes back and gets you later (for the murder he did not commit but got convicted of). The evidence that might have freed him in the second one would have convicted him in the one he never stood trial for. Basically, "in the end, you always get what's comin' to ya."

 

[Rath Darkblade]

Got it. Thanks, Also!