Noir? No Way!

Margaret Maron

I recently taught a seminar on mystery writing to people who were fairly unfamiliar with the genre.  To give them an overview, I drew a continuum from the lightest fluffiest cozy to the post-apocalyptic/balls-to-the-wall/slasher novels and explained that most people do not read across the whole spectrum.  Some start with Lillian Jackson Braun and end with Agatha Christie.  Some
begin with Nero Wolfe and end with Michael Connelly, while others begin with I the Jury and end with Silence of the Lambs or in an even bleaker misogynistic wasteland. I further explained that good and bad writing is to be found in all the permutations and that it's silly to say that a badly written slasher book should be taken more seriously than a beautifully written body-on-the-vicarage-rug book

So many male writers and reviewers have no hesitation in trashing traditional fair-play mysteries, romantic suspense, or what they dismissively call "cozies with cats and cooking," that I'm sure they won't mind if I say how very much I dislike the "boy books" they champion so vigorously—the gratuitously violent,implausible noir novels. The hero  has women lusting for him wherever he turns, and the books are so poorly plotted that whenever the story starts to drag, the author drops in an explicit sex scene or the bad guys inexplicably turn up just where the hero happens to be with no explanation of how they knew where to find him.  That's when we get the obligatory fight scene in which the hero takes kidney punches, kicks in the face, etc. etc., yet bounces back almost immediately.Even if the hero is technically "clean", he often has a sidekick who will do all the nasty things his moral code won't let him do (think Spenser and Hawke, or George Bush and Dick Cheney.) 

If he falls in love, she will usually be the victim or the killer so that our hero is free to lust again in his next outing.

I do not willingly read pornography that substitutes for character development.  I always find myself wondering if the writer is at heart a sniggering 12-year-old or indulging in self-gratification when he goes on and on about penises and [insert crude noir terms for a woman's sex organs] as if his protagonist is the first man ever to notice how well the male and female parts fit together.

Nor do I enjoy lovingly detailed pages of serial killers torturing and then dissecting their victims, of fingernails being pulled out, or of lit cigarettes being touched to a woman's nipples.

Or of bombs wired to a woman's nipples.

Or of clamps being applied to a woman's nipples. 

In fact, if I never again have to read about painful things being done to a woman's nipples, it would suit me just fine.

I remember having a similar discussion with one of these macho writers several years ago.  "It's just fiction," he said.  "Don't get uptight about it."

And then Tony Fennelly wrote The Glory Hole Murders  in which a penis is nailed to a bathhouse wall while it's still attached to its owner, and howls went up from Mr. Macho and his like-minded colleagues.  "But it's just fiction," I told him.

He was not amused.

Do you have parameters?