Lessons in Noir

Published in the Spring 2006 Borderland Noir issue, Lessons in Noir was the zine's most direct statement about craft — an editor reading three exceptional books with a writer's eye and asking what, exactly, makes noir that will be remembered and read long after the bestsellers of the day are forgotten. The essay examined Ken Bruen's The Dramatist and Priest and Seymour Shubin's Witness to Myself. Its lessons still hold up.

Lesson One: Theme Beneath the Plot

All three books, the essay argued, are thematically rich in ways their plots only pretend to be about. The Dramatist — the fifth of Bruen's Jack Taylor novels — is ostensibly a PI story, but it is ultimately about failing: Taylor failing his dying mother, his friend, an old girlfriend, a current one, and finally failing in a way with repercussions he will never escape. Priest picks up with Taylor driven to the madhouse by that mistake; while he hunts the killer who beheaded a priest, the book is really about loss, the walking wounded, and the pain people carry — including the loss of an Ireland Taylor sees slipping away. Shubin's Witness to Myself, pure classic noir, asks whether one isolated act can define a person regardless of how out of character it is. The lesson: a noir plot is a delivery system; the theme is the payload.

Lesson Two: Patience

The books share a confidence rare in contemporary crime fiction: they take their time unraveling. Bruen and Shubin show the small details of their characters' lives and refuse to rush the fireworks — and the result is a build-up of tension and power that leaves the reader breathless by the end. Experienced writers, the essay observed, are confident enough to be patient.

Lesson Three: Humor in the Dark

Both writers deploy humor, differently. Bruen's is an ever-present bantering wit with a hint of fierceness — the essay quoted the moment in Priest when Taylor, falling off the wagon, hands a homeless man first a free T-shirt and then, in a spasm of conscience, the whole batch of booze, and is rewarded half a street later with the shout: more like the devil. Shubin's humor is absurdist: his protagonist, unraveling over a possible crime fifteen years past, reflexively saves a man from suicide — and is then tormented by the rescued man's accusing phone calls. The lesson: noir without humor is merely grim; the laugh that catches in your throat is part of the form's machinery.

Lesson Four: Doom, Calibrated

In Witness to Myself the doom is ever-present and building; in Bruen it rides lighter, hidden under violence and self-loathing. Both calibrations work because each suits its book's voice. Doom in noir is not an atmosphere applied with a spray can — it is a consequence the story has been honestly accruing from page one.

Lesson Five: Voice Above All

Threaded through the essay's four explicit lessons was a fifth it demonstrated rather than stated: none of these techniques transfer without a voice to carry them. The essay's own readings made the case — Bruen's bantering ferocity and Shubin's patient dread achieve the same ends by opposite means, and imitating either surface produces pastiche. What can be learned is the discipline underneath: choose a theme worth the plot, trust the reader's patience, let the humor hurt, and make the doom pay for itself. The voice has to be the writer's own.

Invention also has a practical boundary in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine's guidelines: stories should be entirely fiction, rather than based on actual crimes or other real-life events. That is one publication's rule, but it poses a useful craft problem. A writer must make the trouble convincing through the choices on the page. The claim that something really happened cannot do that work for the story.

Try giving the protagonist a desire, a reason to hide it, and a decision that makes concealment harder. Then let the voice betray what the character wants to keep buried. A narrator can insist everything is under control while the action shows otherwise. The friction between those two accounts creates pressure without borrowing the authority of a real case. A convincing invented consequence matters more than borrowed shock value.

The Larger Point

The essay's underlying claim was that noir is a serious literary tradition that rewards serious craft study — the position the whole zine was built on, and one the literary mainstream has since largely conceded, as ongoing critical work at venues like CrimeReads and the genre's awards bodies, including the Mystery Writers of America, attests. Writers who internalize these four lessons — theme beneath plot, patience, humor in the dark, calibrated doom — are studying the same syllabus Hardluck's editors applied to every submission. See what passed the test in the Archives, and compare this essay's framework with the Psycho Noir introduction, its companion piece on noir's wildest register.