Existentialist literature is the purest form of noir, but it isn’t the best.
Noir film and novels, according to various definitions, usually involve a morally ambiguous main character, a seedy underworld, femme fatale, corrupt system, bleak ending, and lots of cigarette smoke. For neo-noir, add neon (that’s why they call it neo-noir, after all).
The most memorable noir characters were often private detectives – Sam Spade (Humphrey 
Bogart) in the Maltese Falcon, Jake Gittes (played by Jack Nicholson) in Chinatown, Harrison Ford as ‘Blade Runner’ Richard Deckard (not a private eye as such, but not a cop, either) in the movie of the same name.
Private investigators need not be the only noir character – and it is wrong to assume any film with a private dick is noir. However, the 
private eye is the perfect means to portray the loner who works to their own, often opaque, code; who exists somewhere between the demimonde of the criminal underworld and ‘civilised’ society.
They are, in other words, the archetype in genre fiction best able to play the ‘existential’ individual as imagined by philosophers such as Camus and Sartre.
Existentialist philosophy argues that existence precedes essence. In other words, we need not be determined by the arbitrary and absurd rules of the world we are born into, and once we realise this, we can exercise our freedom according to our own codes and values. The core of existentialist philosophy is as follows – life is meaningless, only we can give it meaning.
The rise of existentialist and noir literature around the same time during the inter-war period was no accident. This is a world that saw the aftermath of the Great War, the depths of the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, and the key beliefs of enlightenment ideals: learning, civilisation, and progress, shaken to their very core.
Now, I’ll need to digress here and note that all variety of snobs and douchebags will insist on the superiority of ‘literature’ over ‘genre fiction’. This division, in my view, is arbitrary – and four of the five genre novels below should also be considered literature – but it is a division worth briefly considering.
For the purposes of this discussion, the divide can be understood as follows: existentialist literature, in particular by the likes of Camus and Sartre, explicitly calls itself ‘existential’ and sets out to investigate this theme (classics of Existentialist literature include Albert Camus’ The Stranger, Sartre’s Nausea, the great ‘literary’ science-fiction existentialist story, Kafka’s Metamorphosis). Hard-boiled, neo-noir and cyberpunk authors, for the most part, do not start out with a particular philosophical agenda, and yet many of them explore existentialist ideas with far greater clarity and accessibility.
Noir does this by doing what George Orwell argued the best writing should do: democratise dangerous, important, even revolutionary ideas.
The elegant and sparse (and no less literary for being so) stories of Dashiell Hammett in the 30s, for example, explored the moral vacuum of an era. The crony capitalism of inter-war America, the unchecked power of business and political elites and their collusion in perpetuating a corrupt system, the crushing underfoot of the dreams of regular people. It is a bleak and violent world where a man or woman has nothing but their own integrity, wit and abiding cynicism.
Neo-noir and one of its beloved offspring, cyberpunk, in some ways are able to take the ideas of existentialist philosophy even further than noir. They do this by offering compelling metaphors for the malleability of character, for our ‘existence’ over an a priori essence. Whether through virtual reality (Neuromancer); or replicants (Blade Runner); downloading our consciousness into different bodies, including designer bodies (Altered Carbon); or the inter-changeability of gender (When Gravity Fails), or any other number of mind-bending thought experiments.
The hardboiled, neo-noir and cyberpunk genres, at their best, explore the ideas of human identity: across genders, across physical and virtual forms, of the integrity of the individual in an amoral world. Noir characters don’t concern themselves with justice or meaning: neither exists. Living by one’s own code necessarily means getting your hands dirty; it means a life in the gutter where no one is pure.
The noir character accepts the corruption of the system and knows they cannot change it; however, they also refuse to live by its rules. Fatalistic to be sure, but also providing the faintest ray of hope in an otherwise dark universe.
The following five books just happened to be on my reading list over the past few weeks; fortunately they are all great examples of how powerful ‘genre’ fiction can be in tackling complex philosophical ideas.
The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon are masterful displays of one of the finest hardboiled writers at the peak of his abilities. Dashiell writes with intelligence, wit and a deep vein of cynicism. His characters are vivid and flawed (sometimes fatally).
The legendary Sam Spade of The Maltese Falcon is a darker figure than that cut by Humphrey Bogart in the movie adaption – and the movie was very dark. The story is told from the perspective of Spade, yet his motivations are inscrutable. Whether he is doing what he does for money, love, revenge, or a code is never made completely clear to the reader. A speech by him at the end of the novel suggests he does feel, and deeply, yet his final act is to deny that feeling with brutal absoluteness.
In The Thin Man we see the action through the eyes of Nick Charles and his wife, Nora. Nick is an ex-private eye reluctant about getting drawn into another murder investigation. Like Sam Spade, his motivations are largely inscrutable; his desires seem to revolve around little more than binge drinking and having a good time with his wealthy wife.
The ambiguity of Nick is mirrored by the ambiguity of the author. When he wrote the novel, Hammett doubted whether the actions of the individual had any meaning; he believed the corruption of polite society was entrenched; and he had even rejected the hardboiled genre he created (The Thin Man was to be the last book he ever wrote).
Dashiell Hammett in many ways lived the life of the fatally flawed existentialist antihero. He had a multitude of different occupations before joining the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. While working with Pinkerton he experienced first-hand the brutality of the American underbelly – he was shot at, stabbed, beaten up. Pinkerton was notorious for its strike-breaking activities and Hammett – in what was to become a turning point for his thinking – was offered five thousand dollars to murder a union leader (he declined, the unionist was later murdered by someone else).
Hammett left that life scarred by what he had seen. He became politically active, a communist, and an author. He was blacklisted by the Committee of un-American Activities and served jail time for his political beliefs. He drank and smoke heavily, suffered from debilitating bouts of tuberculosis, and died living the life of a hermit.
Like his characters, Hammett was a self-destructive anti-hero who tried to live his life by a code.
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi is meant to be ‘hard’ science fiction, though in reading it this aspect isn’t the most prominent. Rather, it is the author’s display of inventiveness and imagination that remains the most striking aspect of the novel.
The book is set in a ‘post-human’ future, and begins with the protagonist – a master thief named Jean le Flambeur – in jail. The prison is a virtual replication of the ‘prisoner’s dilemma,’ with inmates forced to confront each other time and again and decide whether to kill, be killed, or cooperate. I found this starting point the weakest part of the novel, too clever by half to encourage the reader to suspend disbelief.
It was after this – when the ideas on memory, its malleability and role in our identity were 
introduced – that the novel became fascinating. The ideas of shared memories, ‘exomemory,’ and memory contracts, plus the concept of time as currency were seamlessly integrated into the universe created by Rajaniemi.
‘Memory contracts’ for example, allow you to reveal who you are to another person (physical identities are obscured by technology), have a conversation, and then have that conversation wiped from memory after it is complete.
The book makes no concessions to the reader in terms of exposition, and I was at least fifty pages in before I went from being confused to intrigued. Tough going at first, but The Quantum Thief is well worth the read.
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, is written by Michael Chabon, a celebrated author of literature. Fortunately for us, Chabon is also a geek who has been loudly sceptical of the division between genre and literary fiction, and has written here an alternate history detective story.
The premise is that the Jewish people were settled in Alaska rather than Israel. He tackles this intriguing – and difficult – premise with a verve that quickly draws the reader in.
It is hard to call the protagonist, Meyer Landsman, an antihero. He lives the life not of a morally ambiguous man, but of a broken one. The death of his sister, his newborn child, and the breakdown of his marriage has left a charred husk of a man living in a flop house, drinking himself into an early grave. He doesn’t persist doggedly with his work for the Sitka Police because of internal code; he does it because he simply has nothing else to live for.
The language used in the Yiddish Policeman’s Union continually inventive, and the story compelling. An accomplished novel and one of the best I’ve read of the alternate-history sub-genre
When Gravity Fails does not hold up well against the other novels in this review – the writing is inferior and the ideas less compelling or enduring.
After the spare elegance of Dashiell Hammett, When Gravity Fails can be downright painful at times, the author filling the pages with pointless exposition and tedious internal monologues from 
the protagonist. Indeed, these internal asides are so prevalent that there isn’t much room for the rest of the story to grow and develop. This results in the main conflicts being dealt with rather summarily, and a story that feels stunted by the time the book is finished.
However, When Gravity Fails is worth reading simply because the world it imagines – an Arab cyberpunk society that has an abundance of transsexual and transgender characters – has never been done before. All the more remarkable given the novel was first published in 1987.
All five novels are worth reading. The Thin Man, The Maltese Falcon and the Yiddish Policeman’s Union are top-notch hardboiled literature, The Quantum Thief brims with fascinating ideas, and When Gravity Fails is passable.
The Thin Man – five stars (out of five)
The Maltese Falcon – four and a half stars
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union – four stars
The Quantum Thief – four stars
When Gravity Fails – two stars
