Priestman, Martin

English

University of New Brunswick: Centre for Digital Scholarship Journals

Book Reviews 95Book ReviewsLee HorsleyThe Noir ThrillerBasingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001. Pp. xi + 305. $65.00Reviewed by Martin PriestmanLike the world it describes, the English term “noir”’ is full of shadows, half-light, and ambiguity. Yes, it means “black,” but only in the context of a historythat writhes from French translations of American crime novels through aspecific group of early postwar films to its post-1970s application to almostanything dark or suspenseful. Leaving it open whether as a noun it denotes “avisual style, a tone, a genre, a generic field, a movement,” or “a cycle” (6), LeeHorsley’s title sensibly uses noir as an adjective “intensifying” the genre-term“thriller,” to indicate a range of twentieth-century works that immerse us andtheir protagonists in “a world gone wrong” (37).Part of the kick of noir is the way it conveys highbrow French approval oflowbrow Anglo-American product. Part of the difficulty of discussing themeaning of the term is to know which level of brow to adopt, and Horsley’sknowingly intertextual opening does not initially flag up her compendiousfamiliarity with the rougher end of the market. Jumping off from the cartoonistMartin Rowson’s conflation of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land with the idiom andiconography of Chandler’s private eye Philip Marlowe, she argues that noir is aversion of absurdist modernism, with respectable antecedents in novelists likeConrad and many links with Existentialism. But though providing a key icon inthe shape of Humphrey Bogart’s film portrayal, the chivalric Marlowe himselfonly represents the shallow end of the noir drowning pool, and hereafter Horsleylargely ignores series detectives because of their contamination by “‘non-noir’traits like integrity, loyalty and compassion” (189).After the Second World War, the gangster anti-heroes of W. R. Burnett anddepression losers of Horace McCoy and James M. Cain are replaced bymonomaniac avengers (including Mickey Spillane’s detective Mike Hammer,who earns his place here through ill-focused violence rather than forensicability), pathetic social climbers, and disengaged psychopaths—the last twotypes being used by Patricia Highsmith and others to expose the moralcontradictions of postwar materialism. Less culpable outcasts increasinglyinclude black men: in Charles Willeford’s Pick-Up, the reason for the hero’sIFR 33 (2006), Jun. 20, 0696 The International Fiction Review 33 (2006)victimization is deliberately withheld until the very last lines reveal his skincolour (173).Sandwiched among such male protagonists, a pivotal exploration of “FatalWomen” makes a strikingly positive case for the genre’s treatment of the femmefatale. Whereas the simplified morality imposed by censorship and the perceivedpublic need for pat endings often makes film noir and its successors complicit in asimple virgin/villain split, the novels on which many of these films are baseddeliberately show how such stereotypes are imposed by the male protagonists’own sorts of guilt and lust. Horsley’s own book cover—taken from JimThompson’s Recoil—shows a desperate male figure fleeing from the magnifiedsiren’s face he himself seems to have projected.In the book’s final part, Horsley identifies a new set of issues arising fromthe rampant consumerism of the last third of the twentieth century. The newprotagonists are “Players”—like Elmore Leonard’s heroes as well as hisvillains—who see their lives as a more or less sick game; “Voyeurs” whosesexually voracious male gaze is confronted head-on by writers like SusannaMoore and Helen Zahavi; and “Consumers” of things and people, like BrettEaston Ellis’s American Psycho . A last section, on gothic and futuristic thrillers,shows present, future, and past looping nightmarishly in works by WilliamGibson, J. G. Ballard, and Peter Ackroyd.In constructing her constantly original argument, Lee Horsley ramsunstoppably through many hundreds of books and a good range of films;astonishingly, either by their positioning in her well-conceived categories orthrough more detailed analysis, she implies a fresh, carefully nuanced reading ofeach. This study of the twentieth-century thriller in all of its darkermanifestations is from now on indispensable.Helen FieldingOlivia Joules and the Overactive ImaginationNew York: Viking Penguin, 2004. Pp. 306. $24.95Reviewed by Nora Foster StovelHelen Fielding launched a whole new subgenre with her novel BridgetJones’s Diary, closely followed by Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Both have beenmade into films. What is the literary equivalent of “chick flick”? “Fem fic,”perhaps? Olivia Joules is Fielding’s latest hapless but charming heroine. A crossbetween a feminine version of Ian Fleming’s James Bond and Kingsley Amis’sLucky Jim, Olivia Joules makes every mistake in the book and still ends up withthe job and the guy. Born Rachel Pixley in Worksop, and orphaned when she

Lee Horsley. The Noir Thriller

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Lee Horsley. The Noir Thriller

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