{"title":"Sequel Reminders","authors":"L. Mitchell","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192844767.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844767.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"The fifth chapter switches to a different, structural issue: that of sequels, which have always appealed to authors of detective fiction. What does returning to an inaugural character require to revive interest in fresh adventures? In turn, how might a single sequel become a larger series, transforming the second novel into a succession of more or less ordered books that avoid simply starting over again, each as if anew? What instead does it take to weave together an enriched, intertwined history for a central detective, even one initially imagined as relatively two-dimensional? Exploring how subsequent novels cement reader loyalty by either addressing or sidestepping earlier episodes, this chapter looks at the stylistic stitching needed to integrate back-stories with more recent episodes. And it takes up the idiosyncratic strategies authors select to fuse memories and flashbacks together with psychological patterns, shaping the sum of individual parts into a more unified portrait.","PeriodicalId":305465,"journal":{"name":"Noir Fiction and Film","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122410465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beyond Authenticity","authors":"L. Mitchell","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192844767.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844767.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Mulholland Drive (2001) forms the centerpiece of the final chapter, which assesses not only cinema’s recent transformation of the detective story but also David Lynch’s exploration of the genre’s multiple ancillary pleasures. So enthralled is he by them that the film comes to seem a meta-investigation, reducing any over-arching plot to sustained uncertainty if not complete irrelevance. Instead, it has been displaced by the beguiling divergences offered from the beginning by hard-boiled divergences. In a film in which all the ingredients of “furniture,” attitude, and identity are present (including a femme fatale, flashbacks, noirish lighting, and identity reconstructed) nothing finally adds up, or is meant to. That may be the most satisfying conclusion to a genre vehicle born of diversion and misdirection.","PeriodicalId":305465,"journal":{"name":"Noir Fiction and Film","volume":"378 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123254592","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lost Identities","authors":"L. Mitchell","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192844767.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844767.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Extending the implications of this turn from fleshed-out character, chapter four highlights the genre’s later focus on identities lost altogether (if only apparently). Among more recent authors, some have collapsed the mysteries earlier involving dead victims with those now entangling the unknown investigator himself. After all, the detective’s presence has always verged on a condition of invisibility, which has gradually become an informing premise within the genre. Central figures more than occasionally seem unaware of their tormented pasts, or even of their own present insights and skills. Alternatively, those who are so aware now strive to protect their identities by staying off the grid, avoiding scrutiny altogether, including the reader’s inquiring eye. Remaining invisible becomes either a chronic, unbidden condition or an increasingly hard act to sustain, with concealment having become the genre’s signature narrative line.","PeriodicalId":305465,"journal":{"name":"Noir Fiction and Film","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125720344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hard-Boiled Intimations","authors":"L. Mitchell","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192844767.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844767.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"The opening chapter explains the sudden advent of hard-boiled writing in the 1920s, to clarify why this curious genre emerged when it did, and what continues to beguile readers as much formally as narratively. If that hardly frames a new critical perspective, the questions are still worth reviewing to show why sociological, historical, even formalist interpretations so often misunderstand the appeal. A more productive approach that focuses on strategies of early hard-boiled writing discloses how it anticipated later, genuinely accomplished detective fiction, which diverts readers’ eyes seductively away from plot and psychology. The most celebrated of early writers—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James Cain—indelibly stamped the genre by deflecting attention from plot to the interest objects hold in themselves. As well, they created fictional heroes notable for garish self-expression rather than credible character, and who thus finally (if paradoxically) remain winningly two-dimensional.","PeriodicalId":305465,"journal":{"name":"Noir Fiction and Film","volume":"136 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134255503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Prologue","authors":"L. Mitchell","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192844767.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844767.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"This introduction discusses genre fiction as a narrative structure that relies on familiar conventions, with particularly stark premises informing the mystery or noir genre. It anticipates the following chapters, which avoid historicist or sociological speculations about the rise of a readership for detective fiction, offering instead a variety of formal explanations for the genre’s continuing appeal. These are mostly stylistic stratagems shared by early hard-boiled writers, then elaborately cultivated in noir films, which seem at first to pale next to the often preposterous violence that drives the plots. But those formal maneuvers attest to a need for diversion, for misdirection and delay, that absorbs attention by swaying it from plot alone. Discussion then shifts to a review of each of the chapters to follow.","PeriodicalId":305465,"journal":{"name":"Noir Fiction and Film","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123241216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dialogue Scaffoldings","authors":"L. Mitchell","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192844767.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844767.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"While this third chapter begins by focusing on the same early pioneers, it veers from inanimate descriptions to constructions of character. That is, Hammett conceived his private investigator as fundamentally figurative, the culmination of a flamboyant style expressed more or less entirely through dialogue, with the flaunting of a cool, flip, smart-assed affect. Subsequent fictional detectives likewise gain our attention by being reduced to stick-figure sketches, little more than quirky gestures and colorful banter. In contrast to other genres, where language tends to realistic transparency while character proves more substantial, detective fiction banks on the impeccable thinness of words deftly turned. Chandler grasped the implications of such seemingly superfluous configurations, with arch similes built on Hammett’s tersely sober expressions. Ever since, genre authors have embellished an ideal of self-conscious “attitude,” celebrating in the process a wry immunity to conventional civic and moral discriminations.","PeriodicalId":305465,"journal":{"name":"Noir Fiction and Film","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128494071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Descriptive Digressions","authors":"L. Mitchell","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192844767.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844767.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter seizes on Hammett’s intriguing early insight that detection requires description more than violence—indeed that, at the genre’s best, description trumps narrative. Chandler and Ross Macdonald extended that premise in elaborate renderings of furniture and wardrobes, of authentic locales and even facial features as a means of inventively diverting attention in order to sustain it. In the process, objects become all but haunted, returning us to plot in a heightened state of awareness, tightening the hold of the past on the present. Admittedly, that descriptive impulse in its frequency and obtrusiveness can come to verge on parody. But as the interruptions of misdirection and diversion occur ever more self-consciously, they also increasingly draw our gaze to the configuration of the whole.","PeriodicalId":305465,"journal":{"name":"Noir Fiction and Film","volume":"408 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123384800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cinematic Resolutions","authors":"L. Mitchell","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192844767.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844767.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Turning from fiction to film, chapter six investigates how hard-boiled and subsequent literary techniques have been translated into cinematic triumphs. Excellent scholarship exists on Hollywood’s adaptations of detective fiction beginning in the 1940s, a discussion requiring no review here. But new possibilities emerged in the neo-noir movement of the 1970s, with a sophisticated conversion of written strategies into visual framings and sonic tracks. Three sets of directors produced acknowledged masterpieces: Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, and the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple. In each, inventive camera movements and non-diegetic compositions intensify strains long present in the detective genre, with a fuller devotion to the distractions of “furniture” and a more pronounced focus on dialogue as snappy performance having replaced character construction, even plot.","PeriodicalId":305465,"journal":{"name":"Noir Fiction and Film","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134537437","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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