Gilles Deleuze : The Philosophy of Crime Novels

James Gunn’s 1942 novel Deadlier than the Male is almost completely forgotten now. It’s been out of print for more than half a century (with the exception of a dismal 2009 Black Mask edition that, clearly, no one proofread prior to printing). Outside of a few old blog posts, some scholarship done on the film adaptation Born to Kill, and a sparse IMDB page on James Gunn’s screenplays, nothing really exists of Deadlier than the Male. Searching for biographical information on Gunn is a futile endeavor. Almost all links point to the sci-fi writer James E. Gunn or the James Gunn who directed Guardians of the Galaxy. Yet, when the book was published, at least one critic called comparisons to James M. Cain and Dashiell Hammett “ludicrous” because Gunn was such a superior writer. The critic argued that Gunn “writes better than Cain ever wrote” and “Gunn’s humor is far younger than Hammett’s and for that matter, far funnier.” The book launched Gunn into a successful career as a Hollywood screenwriter. And, most importantly for my purposes, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze pointed to Deadlier than the Male as his favorite example of what the best crime writing can do.

Deleuze’s 1966 essay “The Philosophy of Crime Novels” inspired me to hunt down an ancient copy of Gunn’s novel years ago. I’ve read and reread it more than I’d like to admit. I worry with every rereading that the book will disintegrate on me. The pages have gone beyond yellow and are now a dull brown. The paper tears with the slightest provocation. I understand now why Deleuze finished his essay by humbly requesting that French publisher Gallimard rerelease the book. In 1966, when books could only be had by mail order or lucking into a bookstore selling a copy, the novel — already 24 years old at that point — must have seemed irretrievably lost. Even now, 77 years after publication and with the benefit of internet booksellers, only a handful of copies are still available. First editions go for over a grand. Before long, the novel will be out of reach.

The real shame in this lies in the novel’s relationship with Deleuze’s essay. Deadlier than the Male without Deleuze’s essay is too wacky. Deleuze’s essay without the novel is hard to pin down. Taken together, they open a fresh approach to writing and reading noir.

Deleuze wrote “The Philosophy of Crime Novels” to celebrate the release of La Série Noire #1000. French writer, actor, and translator Marcel Duhamel had begun the imprint in 1945. He published French translations of works by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ed McBain, David Goodis, Charles Williams, and Leigh Brackett, among hundreds of others. Duhamel himself translated works by Jim Thompson and Chester Himes. He even convinced Himes to switch from literary fiction to crime fiction and gave him $1,000 to start the book that would make Himes famous, A Rage in Harlem (originally For Love of Imabelle). When we talk about noir, we get that term from Duhamel’s series.

Deleuze celebrates Duhamel’s achievements in curating a new style of crime. For Deleuze, contemporary crime novels had shifted away from searches for truth. Initially, crime novels had been concerned with truth in the deductive (or Hobbesian) model as exemplified by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels, or truth in the inductive (or Cartesian) model as exemplified by Gaston Leroux’s Joseph Rouletabille novels. But for Deleuze, who was writing on the verge of the postmodern moment, these quests for truth were dubious. The criminal, Deleuze highlights, “professes allegiance to justice and truth and the powers of deduction and induction” just as much as the cop. Further, police work in Deleuze’s contemporary crime novels (and most crime fiction of today) “had nothing to do with a metaphysical or scientific search for the truth.” It was, instead, a pattern of following hunches, seeking informants, relying on confessions (often made under duress), and rationalizing the worldview the cop brought into the investigation. The crime novel, then, becomes little more than a palliative in the face of a chaotic world. In these novels, the cops’ hunches are verified. The informants don’t lie. The confessions prove something. We live in a world with clearly demarcated good and evil.

Deleuze, of course, doesn’t go for it. After growing up in occupied France during World War II, writing on the verge of the massive student protests that would define the 1960s, and being a self-described “pure metaphysician,” Deleuze was always going to be suspicious of crime novels that profess an easy sense of order. Instead, Deleuze argues that crime novels work best when they look behind the curtain of this supposedly orderly society. “[M]ore profound than either the real or the imaginary,” Deleuze tells us, “is parody.” He goes on to say, “The most beautiful works are those in which the real find proper parody.”

This is why Deleuze is so taken with Deadlier than the Male. For him, it “is a marvelous work: the power of falsehood at its height.”

Deadlier than the Male begins with the provocative first line, “Helen Brent had the best-looking legs at the inquest.” Gunn spends more time at the opening of the novel describing Helen’s legs, her body, her clothes, and her affect than he does explaining what the inquest is all about. We don’t know who was killed or what Helen has to do with it, but we do know, just a few pages in, that Helen “must be destined for a bad end, not necessarily because the Devil would have such a lure for Helen, but because Helen […] would have quite a lure for the Devil.” The meaning is clear: Helen is a femme fatale. She is the female of the species who is deadlier than the male. Before we know what the novel brings, we know who to blame.

This opening must be why Deleuze reads the novel as a parody. The descriptions of Helen feel more like a spoof of a femme fatale than any trope we should take seriously. Part of the reason for that is just how over-the-top Gunn’s description of her is. Part of the reason has to do with what, exactly, Gunn attempts to focus on. He describes her “white sharkskin suit,” her “air of impeccable breeding,” the way she crosses her legs with a “stunning and careless showmanship,” her “elusive aura like white gold,” and her classy taste in clothes and accessories. Rather than describing a sexy, seductive femme fatale, Gunn creates a fabulous one. She’s far closer to Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly than she is to, say, Raymond Chandler’s Velma Valento. The third-person narrative voice reads like it comes from a gay man who wants to go clubbing with her.

This voice provides a clever counterpoint to the typical characterizations of femmes fatales. In Cain’s Double Indemnity, for example, Phyllis Nirdlinger enters the novel and the first-person narrator, Walter Huff, notices her “sweet face, light blue eyes, and dusty blonde hair.” He’s initially unimpressed until she starts hinting at a crime. That’s when Walter notices, “Under those blue pajamas was a shape to set a man nuts.” When Frank Chambers, the first-person narrator of The Postman Always Rings Twice, first sees his boss’s wife Cora, he says, “Except for the shape, she really wasn’t any raving beauty, but she had a sulky look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her.” When Cora and Frank first kiss, Cora tells Frank, “Bite me! Bite me!” Frank does, drawing blood. This idea of Cora as a temptress who pushes Frank beyond reason is exacerbated by the film adaptation. Lana Turner’s Cora is introduced in the film by a slow camera pan that starts at her feet, lingers on her legs, and takes in her scantily clad figure prior to giving her a line. She is instantly seductive, instantly sexual. She is, in a sense, the femme fatale that readers were very accustomed to in the 1930s and ’40s: the woman whom the narrator or the narrative gaze wants both to sleep with and to blame for all of his misdeeds. Gunn’s parodic portrayal of a femme fatale highlights the absurdity of this trope. He doesn’t want to sleep with her. God, no. He wants to help her pick out that marvelous outfit. And if that outfit should drive a man crazy, well, it was probably a short trip there.

When there is a genuine seductress in Deadlier than the Male, Gunn’s descriptions seem to revel in the comedy of the act. He introduces Mrs. Pollicker — a wealthy, soon-to-be-murdered woman entertaining a host of suitors — as “a small woman, fluttery, with very white skin and very dark teeth, with improbable red eyebrows and impossible red hair. She always wore a multitude of ruffles to conceal the fact that she had no chest.” When this bottle-red, dark-toothed woman engages in the actual act of seduction, Gunn describes her as “spreadeagled on the bed, a tangle of ruffles and red fox.” He tells us, “She was only a little drunk,” then sends her through motions that W. C. Fields could choreograph. Gunn takes a similarly sarcastic approach to other characters in the novel, painting one as “very regal. She looked a little like a greasy Queen Victoria, caught on a jerky elevator.” He has fun with his men characters, as well. One paramour wears “a white, fuzzy sweater like a college boy’s, but he was over thirty […] and unless he stood rather too close to a bright light he was very good looking.”

Gunn’s dry sense of humor in crafting his characters has an almost reverse-Tarantino effect. No one is stylized. No one is very beautiful or handsome or cool. All are exposed as far less attractive than they think themselves. They’re comical, and their comedy lends an absurdity to the proceedings.

Not that the proceedings aren’t absurd enough to begin with. Deadlier than the Male follows Helen Brent as she finishes her six-week, easy-divorce residency in Reno and, at the end of it, stumbles upon the bodies of Mrs. Pollicker and her lover. Gunn makes no mystery of who killed them. They were both murdered by a gold-digger named Sam Wild, who stumbles upon them when he makes a late-night call at Mrs. Pollicker’s. Two days later, Sam meets Helen’s sister Georgia at the train station. Three days later, they’re married. Though Helen and Georgia are sisters, their father, when he died, left all of his money to Georgia. Helen, who’d just divorced a sugar daddy without any more sugar, is back living off Georgia’s largesse. So is Georgia’s new husband, Sam. And his gangster buddy Mart. And Sam’s sister Billie. And Billie’s boyfriend Jack. And, if he can get his blackmail scheme to work out right, Sam’s psychiatrist (who’s not really a psychiatrist but rather a con man who bleeds patients for information that he can use against them). High jinks ensue.

As this description suggests, the plot is convoluted. It’s also easy to follow. Gunn shows all of the murders. His scenes shift from the points of view of each character as they plot against one another. Readers get to watch the type of madness that Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles only discover after-the-fact in the Thin Man series. In the end, Deadlier than the Male becomes a book that can’t be taken too seriously.

This, for Deleuze, is half of the point. From his perspective, crime novel tropes only work if they’re self-reflexively absurd. Take the femme fatale, for instance. As a trope in midcentury novels, it ostensibly exposed a truth: that women are the cause of man’s downfall. This idea has been fed to us from the first story in the Bible up to Gone Girl and beyond. As the sexist Rudyard Kipling poem that gives Gunn his title repeatedly insists, the female of the species is deadlier than the male. Gunn’s novel turns this on its head. No one in the book is deadlier than Sam Wild. He murders four people. No one else murders anyone. Helen has nothing to do with the first three murders. And, it’s true, Helen kisses Sam passionately and tells him to murder a woman whom he immediately murders, but Sam had been planning on killing her for most of the book. For half of the book, Helen prevents the murder. To pin the blame on Helen and that kiss is ridiculous. To even consider blaming Helen is to consider the absurdity of the femme fatale trope.

Even the trope of the investigator is turned on its ear in Deadlier than the Male. When Sam Wild kills Mrs. Pollicker and her lover in the early scenes of the novel, the Reno police have a lot of evidence to go on. Even a cursory investigation would point the finger at Sam. But the police choose not to investigate. The only person who looks into it is Mrs. Pollicker’s friend, Mrs. Krantz. Her investigations are more comical than diligent. Mrs. Krantz takes the money she inherits from Mrs. Pollicker and heads to San Francisco, not to find the murderer but to get drunk. Upon arriving in San Francisco, she sees Billie Wild wearing Mrs. Pollicker’s brooch. Mrs. Krantz is too drunk to realize what she’s seen until Billie is long gone. From there, Mrs. Krantz proceeds to drink more and hit on a young bellboy until, by pure chance, she enters back into the orbit of Sam Wild. She is only certain of who the murderer is when Helen — who doesn’t investigate but figures it out because Sam all but tells her he did it — tells her. Almost immediately, Helen scares Mrs. Krantz into going back to Reno and keeping her mouth shut.

Just as Gunn’s portrayal of the femme fatale exposes the trope as a hollow justification of patriarchal society, the comical investigations of Deadlier than the Male disrupt the comfort that crime novels are supposed to bring. They’re supposed to make us feel like murders matter even though we know that most go unsolved, even though we know that murders go unsolved because they happen every day and most people only care when there’s something spectacular about the case. Crime novels are supposed to make us feel like the police and the justice system, or at least the lone wolf private investigators, are obsessed with truth and will do everything in their disposal to find it. Yet we know that most cops, judges, and PIs in real life are just doing a job, happy to convince themselves that the most convenient suspect is the guilty one, untroubled by the fact that suspects who are marginalized by race or socioeconomic class are usually the most convenient scapegoats.

When crime novels expose these fictions that we insist on placing over our society — that the patriarchy knows best, that the justice system is just, that we’re post-racial, that everyone is equal in the eyes of the law, that all humans are created equal — as hollow, they reach their highest form. It’s not enough for Deleuze when crime novels simply parody the form or the genre, the best novels parody what we perceive as the real. Therein lies the power of Deadlier than the Male: it takes our ideas of an orderly, just, civilized society where people act on rational motives; it eviscerates those ideas; and it leaves us laughing at the rubble.

A Lure for the Devil: On James Gunn’s “Deadlier than the Male” and Gilles Deleuze’s “The Philosophy of Crime Novels”. By  Sean Carswell.  Los Angeles Review of Books , November  17, 2019.

Going back through these older essays one is struck by Deleuze’s curious mind. He didn’t have some ultimate plan, instead he had that empowering curiosity that allowed him to wander the highways and byways of life and thought and thereby shed light on both the sublime and the most mundane objects. In his short essay on The Philosophy of Crime Novels, gathered together in Desert Islands, we see his fascination with two aspects of the detective mind. Literature has for the most part always lagged behind the cultural matrix within which it finds itself. Crime novels have been a staple in French society since their inception and one of the editors and promoters of this captivating art form Deleuze honors in this essay was Marcel Duhamel of the famed La Série noire (Éditions Gallimard).

In 1945, under the editorship of Marcel Duhamel , Gallimard  started publishing its translations of British and American crime novels in the La Serie Noire .  In 1946, echoing the Gallimard label, the French critics Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier wrote the two earliest essays to identify a departure in film-making, the American ‘film noir ‘.  Although they were not thought of in the United States as films noirs  (the French label did not become widely known there until the 1970s), numerous postwar Hollywood movies seemed to confirm the French judgment that a new type of  American film had emerged, very different from the usual studio product and  capable of conveying an impression ‘of certain disagreeable realities that do in truth exist’.

Deleuze acknowledges the power of both deductive and inductive reasoning and attributes it too earlier forms of detective fiction, as well as to the dialectical interplay between the French and English approaches to the art of both philosophy and crime detection. From the beginnings in the 19th Century the detective novel devoted itself to the ‘power of the Mind’ and the genius of the Detective to elucidate the activities of the criminal world. At the center of this Deleuze tells us was the deep seated need know the truth about such things:

        “The idea of truth in the classic detective novel was totally philosophical, that is, it was the product of the effort and the operations of the mind. So it is that police investigation modeled itself on philosophical inquiry, and conversely, gave to philosophy an unusual object to elucidate: crime” (Desert Islands, 2004. 81).

What’s fascinating to me about Deleuze is much the same I find in Slovoj Zizek, his ability to take even the most mundane aspect of culture and turn his curiosity as a philosopher into something that sheds light on both the cultural artifact and the philosophical world upon which it is based into something that enlightens as it instructs. He had a light touch, he was neither pedantic, nor a full blown pedagoge, he was able to see with a double eye or vision the dual aspects of our cultural life. In the crime novel he discovered the art of detection, the uncovering of truth as method and quest, and what he discovered was two schools of truth: the dialectical interplay between two cultures – the French and the English.

On the one had he discovered the French school, with Descartes as its masters, who taught us that truth is a “question of some fundamental intellectual intuition, from which the rest is rigorously deduced. On the other hand was the English school of Hobbes, for whom truth is always “induced from something else, interpreted from sensory indices” (81). These were the schools of inductive and deductive reasoning. These two schools of truth produces within the detective novel of these respective cultures a duality from its early inception to now.

Out of the English school came Sherlock Holmes, the master of semiotics, the interpreter of signs, the deductive genius. The inspired creation of Conan Doyle offered us a complex yet idiosyncratic detective whose abilities border on the fantastic, and who is famous for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to adopt almost any disguise, and his use of forensic science skills to solve difficult cases. Holmes’s primary intellectual detection method is abductive reasoning. “From a drop of water”, he writes, “a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other”. Holmes stories often begin with a bravura display of his talent for “deduction”. It is of some interest to logicians and those interested in logic to try to analyse just what Holmes is doing when he performs his “deductions.” “Holmesian deduction” appears to consist primarily of drawing inferences based on either straightforward practical principles—which are the result of careful observation, such as Holmes’s study of different kinds of cigar ashes—or inference to the best explanation. One quote often heard from Holmes is “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.

From the French school Deleuze cites two authors, Gaboriau who created Taberet and Lecoq: Lecoq first appears in L’Affaire Lerouge, published in 1866, in which he is described as “formerly an habitual criminal, now at one with the law, skilful at his job”. Lecoq plays only a minor role in this story, much of which is taken up by Mister Tabaret, an amateur sleuth nicknamed “Tirauclair” (French for “clarifier”), whom Lecoq recommends to help solve a murder; and, second, Gaston Leroux whose creation of the detective Rouletabille is described by Deleuze as always “invoking the right track of reason” and explicitly opposing his theory of certainty to the inductive method, the Anglo-Saxon theory of signs (82).

In an offhand remark after discussing the duplicity of these authors in creating two forms of literature: the detective and criminal, Deleuze brings us to a Freudian leitmotif – the impingement of the Oedipus myth working itself out in some of these very detectives and criminals, saying: “After philosophy, Greek tragedy.” He goes on to say:

                 “…we mustn’t be too surprised that the crime novel so faithfully reproduces Greek tragedy, since Oedipus is always called on to indicate any such coincidence. While it is the only Greek tragedy that already has this detective structure, we should marvel that Sophocles’s Oedipus is a detective, and not that the detective novel has remained Oedipal.” (83)

As always Deleuze shows his distaste of Freudian reductionism and a penchant for the dialogical reversal that sparks greater awareness.

At this point Deleuze recenters his essay and begins in earnest to describe why the authors published in La Série noire were so important. This new literary turn toward the criminal element as anti-hero showed us that “police activity has nothing to do with a metaphysical or scientific search for the truth” (82). He continues: “Police work no more resembles scientific inquiry than a telephone call from an informant, inter-police relations, or mechanisms of torture resemble metaphysics” (82). Instead most of these new forms of criminal fiction show us two distinct types of criminal: the professional hit-man, and the sexual or jealous murderer. Both types are framed not by a quest for truth, but rather by an “astonishing compensation of error”. It is usually shown that the criminal is detected not by some methodical inquiry but due to the criminals own accidental movements in some other area of criminal activity than the one for which he was at first wanted; or, he is “arrested and deported for tax fraud”; or, even provoked to show himself, not through some careful detection, but through long and insufferable stakeouts, that provoke him to make a mistake and show himself (83). Instead of the methodical genius of a detective we have the blundering and error prone street cops who due to know great genius of their own stumble upon a solution and capture the criminal by accident rather than by careful deductive or inductive reasoning.

Why? Why this change in the genre from the grand genius of Sherlock Holmes or Lecoq? Deleuze offers us insight:

                          “This is because the truth is in no way the ambient element of the investigation: not for a moment does one believe that this compensation of errors aims for the discovery of the truth as its final objective. On the contrary, this compensation has its own dimension, its own sufficiency, a kind of equilibrium or the reestablishment of it, a process of restitution that allows society, at the limits of cynicism, to hide what it wants to hide, reveal what it wants to reveal, deny all evidence, and champion the improbable. The killer still at large may be killed for his own errors, and the police may have to sacrifice one of their own for still other errors, and so it is that these compensations have no other object than to perpetuate an equilibrium that represents a society in its entirety at the height of its power of falsehood” (83).

Do we not see that even now? This “power of falsehood” in society to compensate for its own failings by sacrificing and scapegoating? Isn’t this happening across the globalized world? Sacrifice and restitution, as old as Greek Tragedy itself, a power of falsehood at the center of society itself in which the “interpenetration is real, and the complicity deep and compensatory” (83). Do we not see it in the daily news, this law of compensation, this power of falsehood, what Deleuze called the “great trinity of falsehood: informant-corruption-torture” (83). Think of Abu Ghraib! As Deleuze implies: “A society indeed reflects itself to itself in its police and its criminals, even while it protects itself from them by means of a fundamental deep complicity between them” (83). As we contemplate the media, the nightly news or cable comics, we forget our own fraudulent complicity, our deep seated and silent knowledge that we too have caused this horrific world, that we are daily complicit with the global regimes in allowing this horror show to go on.

                     “We know that a capitalist society more willingly pardons rape, murder, or kidnapping that a bounced check, which is its only theological crime, the crime against spirit. … Have we really made any progress in understanding this hybrid of the grotesque and terrifying which, under the right circumstances, could determine the fate of us all?” (84).

He tells us that the realism of the early days was insufficient to “make good literature”, it brought us illusion instead of reality, it promoted stereotypes, puerile notions, and cheap fantasies, “worse than any imaginative imbecile could dream up” (83). Instead what was needed to bring the real back to us was parody, it was through parody that the real returned with a vengeance, and with it the complicity of humans to revel not in truth but in the power of falsehood. We know that parody is a form of imitation, but an imitation characterized by ironic inversion, a repetition with a critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity. Parody is at once a vehicle of satire and a way to portray society through a critical and malicious and often denigrating actant; in the case of crime novels, as seen through the eyes of the criminal. What Deleuze saw in this form was the power to break through the falsehoods that overlay our social blindness and to confront the truths of our own deep and abiding complicities. Without an ability to expose those complicities for what they are we would be forever doomed to repeat the criminal acts that are in themselves the darkest aspect of parody: the truth of our own illusionary lives.

Deleuze: The Philosophy of Crime Novels. By S.C. Hickman. Social Ecologies Blog, December 22, 2012

La Série Noire is celebrating a momentous occasion—its release of #1000. The coherence, the idea of this collection owes everything to its editor. Of course everyone knew something about cops, criminals, and their relationship, even if it was only from reading the papers, or the knowledge of special reports. But literature is like consciousness, it always lags behind. These things had not yet found their contemporary literary expression, or they hadn’t attained the status of common-place in literature. The credit for closing this gap at a particularly favorable moment goes to Marcel Duhamel.2 Malraux had this insight to offer in his preface to the translation of Sanctuary: "Faulkner knows very well that detectives don’t exist; that police power stems neither from psychology nor from clarity of vision, but from informants; and that it’s not Moustachu or Tapinois, the modest thinkers of the Quai des Orfevres, who bring about the apprehension of the murderer on the loose, but rank-and-file cops"…. La Série Noire was above all an adaptation of Sanctuary for a mass market (look at Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish), and a generalization of Malraux’s preface.

In the old conception of the detective novel, we would be shown a genius detective devoting the whole power of his mind to the search and discovery of the truth. The idea of truth in the classic detective novel was totally philosophical, that is, it was the product of the effort and the operations of the mind. So it is that police investigation modeled itself on philosophical inquiry, and conversely, gave to philosophy an unusual object to elucidate: crime.

There were two schools of truth: 1) the French school (Descartes), where truth is a question of some fundamental intellectual intuition, from which the rest is rigorously deduced; and 2) the English school (Hobbes), according to which truth is always induced from something else, interpreted from sensory indices. In a word, deduction and induction. The detective novel reproduced this duality, though in a movement which was proper to the literary genre, and has produced famous examples of each. The English school: Conan Doyle gave us Sherlock Holmes, the masterful interpreter of signs, the inductive genius. The French school: Gaboriau gave us Tabaret and Lecoq; and Gaston Leroux, Rouletabille, who with "a circle between the two lobes of his forehead," is always invoking "the right track of reason" and explicitly opposing his theory of certainty to the inductive method, the Anglo-Saxon theory of signs.

The criminal side of the affair can also be quite interesting. By a metaphysical law of reflection, the cop is no more extraordinary than the criminal—he, too, professes allegiance to justice and truth and the powers of deduction and induction. And so you have the possibility of two series of novels: the hero of the first is the detective, and the hero of the second is the criminal. With Rouletabille and Cheri-Bibi, Leroux brought each series to its perfection. But never the twain shall meet: they are the motors for two different series (they could never meet without one of them looking ridiculous; cf Leblanc’s attempt to put Arsene Lupin together with Sherlock Holmes).’ Rouletabille and Cheri-Bibi: Each is the double of the other, they have the same destiny, the same pain, the same quest for the truth. This is the destiny and quest of Oedipus (Rouletabille is destined to kill his father; Cheri-Bibi attends a performance of Oedipus and shouts: "He’s just like me!"). After philosophy, Greek tragedy.

 Still we mustn’t be too surprised that the crime novel so faithfully reproduces Greek tragedy, since Oedipus is always called on to indicate any such coincidence. While it is the only Greek tragedy that already has this detective structure, we should marvel that Sophocles’s Oedipus is a detective, and not that the detective novel has remained Oedipal. We should give credit where credit is due: to Leroux, a phenomenal novelist in French literature, who had a genius for striking phrases: "not the hands, not the hands," "the ugliest of men," "Fatal-itas," "men who open doors and men who shut traps," "a circle between two lobes," etc.

But the birth of La Série Noire has been the death of the detective novel, properly speaking. To be sure, the great majority of novels in the collection have been content to change the detective’s way of doing things (he drinks, he’s in love, he’s restless) but keep the same structure: the surprise ending that brings all the characters together for the final explanation that fingers one of them as the guilty party. Nothing new there.

 What the new literary use and exploitation of cops and criminals taught us is that police activity has nothing to do with a metaphysical or scientific search for the truth. Police work no more resembles scientific inquiry than a telephone call from an informant, inter-police relations, or mechanisms of torture resemble metaphysics. As a general rule, there are two distinct cases: 1) the professional murder, where the police know immediately more or less who is responsible; and 2) the sexual murder, where the guilty party could be anyone. But in either case the problem is not framed in terms of truth. It is rather an astonishing compensation of error. The suspect, known to the cops but never charged, is either nabbed in some other domain than his usual sphere of criminal activity (whence the American schema of the untouchable gangster, who is arrested and deported for tax fraud); or he is provoked, forced to show himself, as they lie in wait for him.

With La Série Noire, we’ve become accustomed to the sort of cop who dives right in, come what may, regardless of the errors he may commit, but confident that something will emerge. At the other extreme, we’ve been allowed to watch the meticulous preparation of a sting operation, and the domino effect of little errors that loom ever larger as the moment of reckoning approaches (it’s in this sense that La Série Noire influenced cinema). The totally innocent reader is shocked in the end by so many errors committed on both sides. Even when the cops themselves are hatching a nasty plot, they make so many blunders, they defy belief.

This is because the truth is in no way the ambient element of the investigation: not for a moment does one believe that this compensation of errors aims for the discovery of the truth as its final objective. On the contrary, this compensation has its own dimension, its own sufficiency, a kind of equilibrium or the reestablishment of it, a process of restitution that allows a society, at the limits of cynicism, to hide what it wants to hide, reveal what it wants to reveal, deny all evidence, and champion the improbable. The killer still at large may be killed for his own errors, and the police may have to sacrifice one of their own for still other errors, and so it is that these compensations have no other object than to perpetuate an equilibrium that represents a society in its entirety at the heights of its power of falsehood.

This same process of restitution, equilibrium or compensation also appears in Greek tragedy (Aeschylus, for example). The greatest novel of this kind, and the most admirable in every respect, is not part of La Série Noire: it’s Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes, which develops an incredible compensation of errors whose keynotes are an Aeschylean equilibrium and an Oedipal quest.

 From a literary point of view, La Série Noire made the power of falsehood the primary detective element. And this entails another consequence: clearly, the relation between cop and criminal is no longer one of metaphysical reflection. The interpenetration is real, and the complicity deep and compensatory. Fair’s fair, quid pro quo, they exchange favors and no less frequently betrayals on the one side and the other. We are always led back to the great trinity of falsehood: informant-corruption-torture. But it goes without saying that the cops do not of their own accord initiate this disquieting complicity. The metaphysical reflection of the old detective novel has given way to a mirroring of the other. A society indeed reflects itself to itself in its police and its criminals, even while it protects itself from them by means of a fundamental deep complicity between them.

We know that a capitalist society more willingly pardons rape, murder, or kidnapping than a bounced check, which is its only theological crime, the crime against spirit. We know very well that important political dealings entail any number of scandals and real crimes; conversely, we know that crime is organized in business-like fashion, with structures as precise as a board of directors or managers. La Série Noire introduced us to a politics-crime combo that, despite the evidence of History past and present, had not been given a contemporary literary expression.

The Kefauver report,4 and especially the book by Turkus, Societe anonyme pour assassinats, were the source of inspiration for many of the texts in La Série Noire. Many writers did little more than plagiarize them, or rather they turned them into popular novels. Whether it’s the Trujillo regime, or Battista, or Hitler, or Franco—what will be next when everyone is talking about Ben Barka—that begets a hybrid that is properly Série Noire; whether it’s Asturias writing a novel of genius: M. le President,5 or whether it’s people sitting around trying to figure out the secret of this unity of the grotesque and the terrifying, the terrible and the clownish, which binds together political power, economic power, crime and police activity—it’s all already in Suetonius, Shakespeare, Jarry, Asturias: La Série Noire has recycled it all. Have we really made any progress in understanding this hybrid of the grotesque and terrifying which, under the right circumstances, could determine the fate of us all?

So it is that La Série Noire has transformed our imaginings, our evaluations of the police. It was high time. Was it good for us to participate as "active readers" in the old detective novel, and thereby lose our grip on reality and thus our power of indignation? Indignation wells up in us because of reality, or because of masterful works of art. La Série Noire indeed seems to have pastiched every great novelist: imitation Faulkner, but also imitation Steinbeck, imitation Caldwell, imitation Asturias. And it followed the trends: first American, then it rediscovered French crime.

True, La Série Noire is full of stereotypes: the puerile presentation of sexuality, or what about the eyes of the killers (only Chase managed to lend a particular cold life to his killers, who are headstrong and non-conformist). But its greatness belongs to Duhamel’s idea, which remains the driving force behind recent releases: a reorganization of the vision of the world that every honest person has concerning cops and criminals.

 Clearly, a new realism is insufficient to make good literature. In bad literature, the real as such is the object of stereotypes, puerile notions, and cheap fantasies, worse than any imaginative imbecile could dream up. But more profound than either the real or the imaginary is parody. La Série Noire may have suffered from an over-abundant production, but it has kept a unity, a tendency, which periodically found expression in a beautiful work (the contemporary success of James Bond, who was never integrated into La Série Noire, seems to represent a serious literary regression, though compensated for by the cinema, a return to a rosy conception of the secret agent).

 The most beautiful works of La Série Noire are those in which the real finds its proper parody, such that in its turn the parody shows us directions in the real which we would not have found otherwise. These are some of the great works of parody, though in different modes: Chase’s Miss Shumway Waves a Wand; Williams’s The Diamond Bikini; or Hime’s negro novels, which always have extraordinary moments. Parody is a category that goes beyond real and imaginary. And let’s not forget #50: James Gunn’s Deadlier than the Male.

The trend in those days was American: it was said that certain novelists were writing under American pseudonyms. Deadlier than the Male is a marvelous work: the power of falsehood at its height, an old woman pursuing an assassin by smell, a murder attempt in the dunes—what a parody, you would have to read it—or reread it—to believe it. Who is James Gunn anyway? Only a single work in La Série Noire appeared under his name. So now that La Série Noire is celebrating the release of #1000, and is re-releasing many older works, and as a tribute to Marcel Duhamel, I humbly request the re-release of my personal favorite: #50.

Notes:

 1. Arts et Loisirs, no. 18, 26 janvier-1 fevrier, 1966.

2. In 1945, the novelist Marcel Duhamel created "La Série Noire" at Gallimard; it is a series dedicated to the crime novel, which he headed till 1977.

3. Maurice Leblanc, Arsene Lupin contre Sherlock Holmes, 1908, reedited by Livre de Poche.

4. In 1952, a democratic senator issued a report on organized crime in America.

5. M. le President (Paris: Flammarion, 1987).

The Philosophy of Crime Novels 1  By Gilles Deleuze. 

—from Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974. Edited by David Lapoujade. Translated by Michael Taormina. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series (2004), pp 81–85.

The Evening Redness in the West. January 4, 2010. 

Why do the French Love American Noir? And Where does the French Film Noir come from?

French readers appreciate superb writing, especially superb noir, especially when that noir is from the US. This has been proven time and again in the post-war period, but it first came to my attention in 2008 when I started reading New Jersey-based author, Mark SaFranko. I became a fan of his work and was surprised he wasn’t more popular in his home country. Then I learned he had a huge following in France. That story repeated itself a few times in the following years, and eventually I accepted a blanket truth: the French have great taste in books. Now, after years of being an author and a reviewer, I know more about publishing than I did back when I first read SaFranko or learned the extent to which the French love Harry Crews. I also know many more American writers with thriving careers in France. So I thought, why not ask them what they think this French love of American noir is all about?

The perfect example of this cultural phenomenon may be Benjamin Whitmer and his latest novel, Evasion, published by Gallmeister, a French publisher specializing in American noir and nature literature. Evasion has been nominated for awards and recently became a bestseller in France; it hasn’t been published in the US. Let that sink in. Whitmer, author of Pike and Cry Father, is one of the finest purveyors of noir in this country, and francophones are enjoying his latest while American publishers are sleeping on it.

Whitmer was the starting point in my quest to find out the main differences between American and French publishing and, perhaps more importantly, book culture. I asked him why he thought American noir appeals to French readers.

“To be honest, I’m not sure it’s especially a French thing. I think people all over the world read noir, read tragedy,” said Whitmer. “The only place where there is no place for noir or tragedy is America. As David Vann said, ‘We have the idea in America that a book should have likable characters and make us feel good by the end. This is a new and idiotic idea and erases 2,500 years of literary culture.’ No other culture is dumb enough to believe that. That takes a specifically pathological self-concept and denial of reality.”

Laura Lippman, the New York Times bestselling author of Sunburn, After I’m Gone, and many others, thinks the French obsession with American writers stems from their love of stories that depict the country as they imagine it, and not because of American noir’s gloomy, violent nature.

“I think other countries like fiction that presents the US as they think it is,” said Lippman. “And while noir is a big part of that, so is what I’ll call suburban suspense, the kind of novels that won Harlan Coben such a huge following in France.”

While I don’t disagree with Lippman and Whitmer, I think there is a special place in the heart of French readers for noir. Even the term comes from them. While there are rumors that the term had been used since 1939, the most commonly accepted origin narrative traces it back to French film critic Nino Frank, who started using it in 1946 to refer to black and white Hollywood films influenced by American hardboiled fiction.

Jake Hinkson, author of The Blind Alley, No Tomorrow, and The Big Ugly, has had his work translated to French and has won the Grand Prix des Littératures Policières and the Prix Mystère de la Critique. Like Whitmer, Hinkson has been traveling to Europe as he cultivates success there. He agrees with Whitmer on one thing: the French love American noir because it illuminates the soul of the country, the real America.

“I think the French are fascinated with American noir because they’re fascinated by America,” said Hinkson. “They view noir as a body of literature that is critical and revealing of American culture. I don’t think the French have much respect for things that Americans think are classy (your average Oscar-bait movie, for instance), and they tend to be a little weary of all the stuff that is NYC-centric or overly LA. But they’ve always had a fascination with other parts of the country, the ‘real America’ if you will. That’s why the French were the first ones to the recognize the artistic merits of things like jazz and gospel. It’s why they embraced regional artists like Faulkner. And it’s why they were the first ones to recognize that guys like Thompson and Goodis weren’t just failed pulp writers but rather authentic and unique literary talents.”

William Boyle, author of Death Don’t Have No Mercy, A Lonely Witness and Gravesend, has also had his work translated into French and published by Gallmeister. He has been nominated to the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and has traveled to France recently to participate in readings and festivals. He echoed Hinkson’s thoughts.

“They know that American noir presents a true portrait of this country, that it doesn’t hold back or hide things, that it isn’t afraid to search the dark corners,” said Boyle. “I think they know that noir has always told the truth about America—they were the ones who first sensed that. Also, they’re not turned off by unlikeable characters or unhappy endings.”

Unhappy endings. I love them. In fact, noir works best for me when there is no space for the bland, cliched happy endings that have become sine qua non elements of Hollywood movies and most formulaic crime and horror fiction nowadays. Perhaps the best explanation of this love for unflinching truth the French have comes from David Joy, author of The Line That Held Us and The Weight of This World, both of which have been translated to French and published by Sonatine Éditions.

“In my experience, French readers tend to be a braver lot,” said Joy. “I think the thing about good noir that’s hard for some folks is that it forces you to go to uncomfortable places and to confront uncomfortable things and a lot of readers just aren’t willing to do that. I think that’s particularly true of American readers. I say this because of the books that sell well in the States. I say this because of the criticisms I hear about books time and time again. For the most part, what moves in this country are airplane books—something I can pick up in a terminal, read on a flight, and toss in the trash before I catch a cab. It’s something to fill time more than it is something to challenge beliefs. I hear people say, ‘Well, I didn’t relate to the characters.’ I’m sorry, but I don’t believe relatability is a requirement of good literature. In fact, I believe the opposite. I believe good literature allows us to walk in the shoes of someone we might otherwise dismiss. For me, that statement about not relating to characters boils down to a refusal to venture into uncomfortable ground. That’s not something I’ve experienced with French readers. They tend to still want books that are challenging. They seem to still view literature as an instrument of critical thinking and change.”

So what is the main difference between France’s literary culture and our own? This was not something I had thought about from the beginning. Instead, this was a question that developed over time. The more I learned about French literary culture, the more I liked what they do and how they do it. When two French publishers started showing interest in my novels, I became really curious. The fact that publishers so far from here are aware of what’s happening in indie publishing in the US is a testament to how much they care about good books. Joy thinks French book culture is great because it’s part of their fabric as a society.

“Books just matter more,” said Whitmer. “Somebody over there once told me that the difference between their politics and ours is that we could never elect a politician who didn’t profess to believe in God, and they could never elect a politician who didn’t read. It’s baked into every part of their life. Reading and books are afforded an entirely different weight in France. They don’t have creative classes in France, because their conception of it is that it’s something too special to be taught. It can be a little unnerving as an author, but it means that they’ve gone to great lengths to protect their book culture, and not allowed it to become the almost entirely corporate entity ours has via Big 5 publishing and Amazon.”

Meanwhile, Hinkson said that both cultures are vastly different in terms of what reading means and how it’s perceived. “Reading in France is a national obsession,” said Hinkson. “It’s a wholly different culture than the States. I mean, people go to college to be booksellers. It’s not just seen as a part-time job like it is here. It’s a profession. At book events, writers don’t read their work, they just discuss it with the audience. And the questions aren’t ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ or ‘What time of day do you like to write?’ It’s graduate-school level discussions of character and theme. It’s probing and personal. And, I mean, these questions are coming from regular people. Americans have always been suspicious of intellectuals. The French just…aren’t. They respect intelligence and expertise. They don’t have that ‘You think you’re better than me ‘cause you think you’re so smart’ chip-on-the-shoulder thing that we have here. For a writer, it’s extremely exciting.”

What Hinkson’s comments illuminate is that French readers, publishers, and booksellers love and respect books and the people who write them. They also take bookselling seriously and support bookstores. This was also something Lippman (“Books really matter in France”) and Boyle (“They value independent bookstores and booksellers in a way that just knocks me out”) both noted in their responses. Furthermore, the French also value literary festivals and treat authors like celebrities when they go over for an event.

That said, there are other elements at play that are part of the business side and that further separate both reading cultures. According to Joy, economics and reading practices play a huge part of it.

“For starters, the French consume more books,” said Joy. “You look at the statistics and the French are always in the top ten well-read countries in the world. They’re typically somewhere around number seven. The U.S., on the other hand, we’re lucky to make the top 30. People just don’t read here. In this country, one third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives. Forty-two percent of college graduates never read another book after college. Eighty percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year. Seventy percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years. That’s staggering. What I love most about book culture in France, though, as opposed to the States, is the fixed pricing model. Retailers have to sell books for the listed cover price. What that’s done is stripped the privilege and advantages of bulk retailers like Amazon who are able to sell books for a fraction of the list price, and it has given that power back to the small independent booksellers who serve communities all over the country. Here in the U.S. it takes a deliberate choice to say, I’m willing to pay full retail so that my dollars stay within my community, and the fact is most Americans aren’t willing or are unable to make that choice. As a result, our independent bookstore culture has struggled to survive.”

The reason why French readers love American noir is not simple. In fact, there are multiple elements at play. Reading is engrained in French culture. Intellectualism is celebrated instead of made fun of and feared. Unhappy endings are accepted and even encouraged because they are understood to be part of life.

Noir shows the US in a negative light that reveals a lot of brutality, and that’s part of how the French imagine the underbelly of the country (and they are not wrong). French readers are fearless about bad things and crave fiction that shows the States as the hyper-violent place it is, especially for minorities, immigrants, and poor people—American noir delivers that. Every author interviewed for this piece writes superb, dark fiction, and they should be treated like celebrities here. Unfortunately, we need to change a few things about our book culture, starting with the tendency to dislike a narrative solely because it doesn’t have a happy ending.

I suggest we start working on those changes because, as it stands now, my response has morphed slightly: “Why do the French love American noir? It’s complicated, but to put it simply, they have better taste than us when it comes to books and treat writers the way they deserve.” Yeah, I know that’s a problematic answer, but maybe it gets the conversation going in the right direction. The first step? Go read these wonderful authors and let their darkness, which is our collective darkness, into you heart.

Why do the French love American Noir? By Gabino Iglesias. Crimereads, January 30,  2019. 

Any discussion of French film noir must begin by challenging a few myths.

Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton’s seminal A Panorama of American Film Noir, first published in 1955, sees film noir – despite the French name – as an American phenomenon. French attempts are dismissed as imitation and confined to the post-war period. In a remarkable case of cultural amnesia that overlooks France’s contribution to the genre, the French critic Nino Frank is credited with coining the phrase in 1946, in the excitement of discovering a batch of Hollywood noir movies banned during the war. Another legend sees the expression ‘film noir’ originating in the Gallimard Série noire imprint of crime novels, founded by Marcel Duhamel in 1945

Yet, as the film critic and theorist André Bazin noted, “In French pre-war cinema, even if there wasn’t exactly a genre, there was a style, the realist film noir,” referring to films that critics such as Frank had named as such before the war. For instance, a review of Pierre Chenal’s Le Dernier Tournant (The Last Turn, 1939) – the first adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice – states: “Here is another film noir, which belongs to the sinister series which starts with Les Bas-fonds and Crime et châtiment and continues with Pépé le Moko and Le Quai des brumes, La Bête humaine and Hôtel du Nord. No doubt this series has produced the most significant French films of the last few years.”

The importance and impact of American film noir are of course not in question. Nevertheless, as the above suggests, and scholarship now amply demonstrates, a powerful current that merits the adjective ‘noir’ runs through French cinema. Many of the films are famous in their own right. Some are regarded as part of a movement known as poetic realism: dark, melodramatic films that fuse two apparent opposites – a ‘realistic’ description of working-class lives with a poetic, or lyrical, style. (Pierre Chenal’s 1934 La Rue sans nom is the first film to be called as such, and the movement’s greatest classics are probably Marcel Carné’s Le Quai des brumes in 1938 and Le Jour se lève in 1939.) Other titles are famous as the work of filmmakers known for their proclivity for dark subjects and style (Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jean-Pierre Melville). But longer and deeper continuities sustain the persistence of noir in French film, which will be examined here in its heyday, from the early 1930s to the late 1960s.

Although the phenomenon was not confined to France, French writers showed a strong attraction to the underbelly of society, the ‘bas-fonds’ (‘lower depths’), from the early modern period onwards and in particular in the 18th-century roman noir, examining those living on the margins of the big cities, the poor and the criminals. This first culminated in the 19th century in the aftermath of the French Revolution and against the background of urbanisation and capitalism, with a particular focus on Paris. A supreme early expression was Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), soon followed by many novelists (Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Sue), journalists and campaigners, and even a criminal turned chief of police, Eugène François Vidocq. It is no accident that Edgar Allan Poe located his short story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841, credited as the first detective story) in Paris; in turn, it gave rise to a long tradition of international crime literature to which all film noir is directly or indirectly indebted.

Meanwhile, the late 19th century saw a fundamental shift in attitudes to the bas-fonds from revulsion to fascination. This was in part due to the Romantics and their love of bohemia. They continued to be fascinated by the poverty, vice and crime that defined representations of the urban lower depths, but they observed it with a greater poetic – and increasingly, nostalgic – sensibility. Such attitudes are in evidence in the work of a number of 20th-century French-language writers who produced key texts for French film noir, among them Pierre Mac Orlan, the author of Le Quai des brumes, who coined the phrase ‘social fantastic’, a precursor of ‘poetic realism’.

Mac Orlan and others, such as Francis Carco and Eugène Dabit, were close to the so-called populist literature of the 1920s that focused on the working classes, but which were not untouched by crime. Concurrently, crime literature thrived; particularly influential were two Belgian writers, Stanislas-André Steeman and, especially, Georges Simenon. Their novels explored all backgrounds, with a predilection for the teeming faubourgs of Paris and low dives in the port towns of Le Havre or Marseille. For decades to come, Simenon would prove one of the richest single sources of noir stories, both for his ‘hard novels’ in which crime is located in the everyday, and for his policiers featuring the solid, pipe-smoking Inspector Maigret. Two early Maigret adaptations, Jean Renoir’s La Nuit du carrefour (Night at the Crossroads, 1932) and Julien Duvivier’s La Tête d’un homme (1933) set the tone for a certain social voyeurism and the ambiguous intermingling of criminals and law-abiding citizens against picturesque mean streets.

From different corners of high and low literature, this interest in the dark corners of French society proved highly successful (extending also to popular song) and provides part of the cultural background that eventually led to French film noir. But the migration of these motifs to French cinema only came about through developments in photography and cinematography that converged in the French capital between the two world wars. Although dark melodramas and crime cinema existed in the silent period, French film noir proper began with the coming of sound around 1930.

The review of Le Dernier Tournant quoted above laments the “special atmosphere” of “characters led to destitution and death by an implacable destiny”, concluding, “It seems unfortunate that the French film ‘school’ is represented by films which… are long poems to discouragement.” While this atmosphere was indeed predicated on narratives of doom and despair, it also owed a lot to trends in visual arts that were not confined to the ‘French film school’.

Paris in the 1930s was a magnet for photographers, particularly Central and Eastern European émigrés, and the attraction of the city was reinforced by the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany: André Kertész, Brassaï, Germaine Krull and François Kollar, to name the most famous, documented French society, often relishing the city’s less salubrious corners. Particularly famous is Brassaï’s collection The Secret Paris of the 30s, with its nocturnal sewage workers, barmen, pimps and prostitutes, in a dense, inky idiom. His combination of glamorous chiaroscuro, louche subjects and poetic tone was extreme. Yet its shadowy iconography and mingling of working and criminal classes found echoes in the flourishing sensationalist press of the time (eg, Détective, a popular weekly magazine published by Gallimard from 1928, which specialised in sensational murder enquiries and mysteries), and had clear parallels in film, notably Renoir’s La Chienne (1931), La Nuit du carrefour and La Bête humaine (1938); Anatole Litvak’s Coeur de Lilas (1932); Jacques Feyder’s Le Grand Jeu (1934); Duvivier’s La Tête d’un homme, La Bandera (1935) and Pépé le Moko (1937); Jean Grémillon’s Gueule d’amour (1937); Carné’s Le Quai des brumes and Le Jour se lève; and Chenal’s La Rue sans nom and indeed Le Dernier Tournant.

It is a cliché to point to the impact of German expressionism on film noir, yet like all clichés it contains some truth. Many German émigrés transited via France en route to Hollywood and left an indelible mark. Some filmmakers (Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, G.W. Pabst) stayed only briefly, but others, such as Robert Siodmak, had a greater impact (Mister Flow, 1936; Mollenard, 1938; and Pièges, 1939, all contain noir thriller elements).

German directors of photography such as Curt Courant and Eugen Schüfftan worked extensively on French films, importing expressionist imagery. They also directly trained, or indirectly influenced, French colleagues such as Jules Kruger, Marc Fossard, Claude Renoir and Nicolas Hayer. Some of the most memorable noir images in the 1930s and beyond can be traced to German-inspired cinematography: Courant’s glittering work on the murder scene in La Bête humaine, Schüfftan’s dramatic lighting effects in Le Quai des brumes, and Hayer’s brooding shadows from Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (1943) to Melville’s Le Doulos (1962). As critic Emile Vuillermoz put it in 1939, “Noir is currently the colour of fashion in our studios.”

The precision and beauty of this type of lighting, both contrasted and diffuse, in conjunction with the remarkable sets of Lazare Meerson and Alexandre Trauner (and their disciples) defined French film noir by marrying an international visual style to minutely observed French decors. In the process, they imbued sordid lower-depths locations, such as the bars in Le Grand Jeu and Le Quai des brumes or the workhouse in Renoir’s Les Bas-fonds (1936), with a poetic grandeur. In respect of this visual style, as well as in terms of subject matter and literary origins, French film noir in the 1930s overlaps more or less with poetic realism, even though a few poetic realist films are less easily identified as noir, largely because of the absence of a criminal element within them – such as Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934) – or because of their comic slant, such as Carné’s Hôtel du Nord (1938).

The noir visual aesthetic continued, often in even darker mood, in post-war classical French cinema that looked back towards the pre-war films, such as Carné’s Les Portes de la nuit (1946), Clouzot’s Quai des orfèvres (1947) and Yves Allégret’s Une si jolie petite plage (Such a Pretty Little Beach, 1948). But noir left poetic realism behind in gangster films, such as Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), and the resistance drama Marie-Octobre (Duvivier, 1959) and many others. The arrival of the New Wave and its taste for location shooting inevitably had an impact, yet it did not banish the glamour of night-time urban scenes – far from it, as we can see in precursors such as Melville’s Bob le flambeur (1956) and Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold (1958), but also in the New Wave’s own noir pastiches, such as François Truffaut’s Shoot the Pianist (Tirez sur le pianiste, 1960) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965). Made just before colour became the norm, these noir tributes may be seen as the last outposts of stylish black-and-white cinematography.

French film noir thus has long antecedents in written and visual representations of the bas-fonds, and visual characteristics informed by contemporary professional practice and geopolitical developments. Equally significant was the immediate French social background, including the rise of fascism in the 1930s, the left-wing Popular Front alliance of 1936-38, the war and German occupation of 1940-44, and the post-war advent of American-inflected modernity. As products of popular culture, French film noirs neither adopt an explicitly political stance nor simply ‘reflect’ contemporary events. But they undoubtedly bear the traces of their respective traumatic social contexts. In the late 1930s, for instance, some can be read as meditations on Popular Front hopes and then disillusionment, and in the post-war period, they explicitly engage with American culture, providing a cultural framework for shifting definitions of national identity. But the area in which they most visibly echo changing social parameters is in their delineation of gender relations.

Just like its American counterpart, French film noir is the genre par excellence of masculinity in crisis, brimming with vulnerable men drawn to crime, ‘victims’ of alluring females, or preys to a cruel fate. Building on the charisma of glamorous stars, the films side with these maladjusted figures. In the 1930s Jean Gabin epitomised the tragic proletarian hero haunted by the past, lured by a scheming – or even innocent – woman, defeated by evil patriarchs or just circumstances (Pépé le Moko, Gueule d’amour, La Bête humaine, Le Quai des brumes, Le Jour se lève).

As we have seen, these overtly pessimistic scenarios drew critical disapproval in some quarters, yet their murderous and/or suicidal heroes did not trouble the censors (unlike in Hollywood, where various remakes saw their endings modified) and they continued to draw audiences. During and immediately after the war, the more weary masculinity of central male figures, in Le Corbeau, Les Portes de la nuit, Quai des orfèvres, Une si jolie petite plage and Manon (Clouzot, 1949) can easily be mapped against the traumatic defeat of France, the humiliations of the German occupation and the retributions that followed.

While some scholars see the godfather-like protagonists of the post-war gangster films as a symbolic restoration of patriarchal power, equally striking is these characters’ ultimate powerlessness and penchant for nostalgia, despite the films’ surface modernity. In Touchez pas au grisbi and Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955) and many others, a stint in jail is a coded reference to the war years, and regret for the passing of the pre-war ‘good old days’ is pervasive. This is also striking in the self-conscious tributes to Hollywood noir towards the end of the period, as seen in Melville’s anachronistic gangsters in Le Doulos and Le Samouraï (1967), respectively played by Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon.

Against this panorama of flawed, yet glamorous and charismatic male figures, the women of French film noir are less exalted, presented as marginalised and often degraded figures. Here too historical patterns emerge. Notable women in pre-war noir include the hapless prostitute of La Chienne (Janie Marèse), the kept women of Pépé le Moko and Gueule d’amour (Mireille Balin in both cases), the capricious child-woman of La Bête humaine (Simone Simon) – charming yet clichéd products of populist literature. One exception is the idealised romantic ‘waif’ of poetic realism, the archetype being Michèle Morgan in Le Quai des brumes. But across the decade, none of these women is endowed with much narrative agency or erotic power. In the 1940s, Le Corbeau testifies to stronger female figures emerging in the war years, in noir as well as other genres.

But with some exceptions, such as Les Portes de la nuit, in which the standard poetic realist woman is made to look like a Hollywood icon (initially to be played by Marlene Dietrich, replaced by the inexperienced Nathalie Nattier), post-war noir takes a striking misogynist turn. Extreme noir melodramas such as Manon, Manèges (Yves Allégret, 1950) and Voici le temps des assassins (Deadlier than the Male, Duvivier, 1956) showcase women as evil or perverse creatures bent on destroying men. Only in the rare instances when the noir women are embodied by major stars such as Simone Signoret in Les Diaboliques (Clouzot, 1955) and Brigitte Bardot in La Vérité (Clouzot, 1960) do they attain real glamour and a degree of complexity. Meanwhile, the policiers infantilise gangsters’ molls, symbolised by the slaps they frequently receive; Melville’s films relegate them further to the role of alibi, whether treated cruelly (Le Doulos) or kindly (Le Deuxième Souffle, 1966; Le Samouraï).

The sense of the popularity of French noir being used to mete out a symbolic backlash against the growing post-war emancipation of women in real life is hard to escape. Nor is this trend contradicted by auteur cinema adaptations of US noir fiction, such as Truffaut’s Shoot the Pianist, The Bride Wore Black (La Mariée était en noir, 1968) and The Mississippi Mermaid (La Sirène du Mississipi, 1969). With very few exceptions, women in French film noir are denied both the transgressive power of the femme fatale and the affirmative role of the ‘good girl’ of their American counterparts. The real drama is always that of the young homme fatal or of the ageing patriarch.

Throughout the period evoked above, there were other successful genres in French cinema besides film noir, including comedy and costume film. Yet, as in Hollywood, it is noir that caught the cultural imagination. Like 19th-century readers of Hugo and Balzac and 20th-century fans of Simenon, we are endlessly drawn to the dark universe of crime, failure and melodrama, almost always ending in death. It is indicative that the best filmmakers in the period (Renoir, Duvivier, Clouzot, Melville among them) all worked in this idiom, producing a string of beautiful, sombre films. Like the literature of the bas-fonds, film noir projects a fantasy that may not be factually accurate but nevertheless gets to the heart of the darkest corners of society and human nature.

How the French birthed film noir. By Ginette Vincendeau. Sight & Sound, November 15,  2016