Noir? Let’s Call it Grayscale

You have a Pantone for that?

Guest Post

By M.E. Proctor

When Love You Till Tuesday, Book 1 in the Declan Shaw series, came out last year, some reviewers called it ‘neo-noir’. I was pleased, what crime writer wouldn't be, but the cool label made me squint a little. Did the book belong on that shelf?

Purists contend that the genre requires despair, bad decisions and bad karma, seasoned with a hefty dollop of cynicism. There cannot be the hint of a happy ending. Your goose is cooked, buster, no matter what. Read or watch Double Indemnity, it checks all the boxes.

If we stick to these strict principles, the classic detective story is not ‘pure’ noir. Raymond Chandler in The Simple Art of Murder is very clear, here’s what he says about the detective:

“He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”

Hero, honor … so Marlowe wouldn’t belong to the genre? Not enough doom and gloom? Okay, I’m not going to pick a fight with the purists. After all, Chandler created his iconic character well before the term was in common use. Same for the films that are now listed as classics of the kind. Jacques Tourneur didn’t know he was shooting a film noir when he did Out of the Past in 1947.

As if I needed more reasons to shrug off labels …
Made me think though. Where does Love You Till Tuesday grade, if not perfectly noir (the detective is the hero and honorable) how gray is the story?

• An urban setting: Houston isn’t L.A. or New York but it has its share of warehouses and dive bars. Add to it a spaghetti bowl of freeways, permanent traffic headaches, and suburbs so cookie-cutter they’re claustrophobic. Season generously with the suffocating summer heat and oppressive humidity. I’d say that’s a solid Dark Gray, Charcoal possibly (mostly because a lot of the action takes place in daylight).

• A dead jazz singer: Smoky clubs, too much booze, sadistic and senseless murder. Black.

• A doomed love affair: A one-night stand leads to Declan being manhandled and hauled to jail. Because he’s exonerated quickly: Cool Gray.

• A corrupt businessman, a sleazebag rival PI, two nasty cops (one a vicious freak and another who thinks with his fists), an albino monster with a hammer. Oh baby … Jet Black.

• A compromised lawyer: he cheats on his wife, he’s blackmailed, he breaks under pressure … He doesn’t die but his life is flushed down the drain. That hapless guy is the true noir character in the story.

If I add it all up, maybe the neo-noir sticker fits after all.

Deciding if Catch Me on a Blue Day, Book 2 of the series (just released from publisher Shotgun Honey) belongs to the same category is less clear cut.

For starters, Declan Shaw is in New England, in the kind of small coastal town they put on postcards and tourist information websites. The marina is chockful of white boats, quaint shops abound on Main Street, there’s a chocolatier and an art gallery. It’s even unclear, at first, if a crime was committed. A famous reporter, former war correspondent, killed himself. He had asked Declan to come up to help with research for his book, an analysis of the Salvadoran civil war of the 1980s. The suicide is suspicious, of course. The man had just talked to Declan on the phone and gave no indication he was in trouble.

The color swatch is a pastel array best suited for cozy mysteries, and the cast of characters is similarly benign, in appearance. The chief of police is gruff, as befits a cigar chomping big guy who’d rather go fishing than dealing with a PI who keeps asking difficult questions. A couple of mild-mannered retired professors rent cabins to budget-minded visitors. A professional fisherman is hostile but eventually turns sociable … where’s the bite, you’ll ask.

I’ll let the chief of police, Burt Halston, make the point. Here he’s explaining the lay of the land to Declan.

Halston pointed at the boats. “It looks pretty, doesn’t it?”

“Nature and inanimate objects. I’m a city boy. I know it’s people that make things ugly.”

“How hard was it to learn that kind of wisdom?”

“I’m more back alleys than country roads. In a way it makes it easier. Bad guys look the part. They don’t sip martinis at the country club. They down boilermakers at O’Leary’s bar.”

“That’s the kind of thing you don’t want to say aloud when some people are around, son.” Halston shook his big head side to side. It made him look like a bull bothered by a pesky fly. “I was born here. Down a dirt track, in these woods. Not far from Bill Hannigan’s shack, Mike’s grandpa. We didn’t have much, but we had more than the Hannigans. My mom took some misplaced pride in that, poor soul. That’s how it goes here, Shaw. There’s a ladder and you’re taught at a young age what rung you’re clinging to. Raise a hand to grab the next rung and lift yourself, and you’ll be tumbling down before you have time to say amen. Might be different in Texas.”

Feels noirish? This book leans into societal disfunctions. The glossier the surface, the deeper the cracks underneath. Class also plays a role in the Salvadoran part of the plot. When Declan interviews a civil war survivor, she describes the death squad leader:

“You could tell he was upper class, not a peasant like the others. He had a soft voice. Educated. I didn’t know people could be crazy and look like that.”

Things are not what they seem. The ground that looks solid is wobbly. A cocky PI is at the mercy of one fateful slip. It might not be the textbook definition of the noir genre, but it sure is dark enough for me.

In closing, I’ll give you the character in Catch Me on a Blue Day who could have, at a stretch, stepped into Marylyn Monroe’s shoes in The Asphalt Jungle. Updated to this century with a degree in art history. She isn’t a femme fatale but she’s far from innocent. I’ll stack my noir credentials on that dame …

• Isabel Sanders. She wants to go places. She manages the art gallery and could wear a tee-shirt that say Bored in Connecticut. She’s wily and smart but her sexual drive gets in the way. Her encounter with Declan—or should I say collision? —raises the town’s ambient temperature a few sultry degrees.

Ah! Isabel was a lot of fun to write … Chapter 4 … you’ve been warned.

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Love You Till Tuesday is available in eBook and paperback. On Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Love-You-Till-Tuesday-Proctor-ebook/dp/B0DB47YVG1

Catch Me on a Blue Day is available in eBook and paperback. On Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0FR3DWYGD

Bio:

M.E. Proctor was born in Brussels and lives in Texas. She’s the author of the Declan Shaw detective mysteries. The first book, Love You Till Tuesday, came out from Shotgun Honey. Catch Me on a Blue Day is the next installment in the series. She’s the author of a short story collection, Family and Other Ailments, and the co-author of a retro-noir novella, Bop City Swing. Her fiction has appeared in Vautrin, Tough, Rock and a Hard Place, Bristol Noir, Mystery Tribune, Reckon Review, and Black Cat Weekly among others. She’s a Shamus and Derringer short story nominee. Author Website: www.shawmystery.com

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