Musings on Noir Heroes; guest post from Luke Deckard

Luke Deckard is a thoughtful member of the new generation of crime writers, a generation which I'm keen to encourage whenever I can. So I was glad to include a short story of his in the forthcoming CWA anthology Midsummer Mysteries. His new novel Bad Blood, a Logan Bishop thriller, has just been published, and to celebrate this, I invited him to contribute a guest blog post. Here it is:
'In Plato’s The Republic, he writes, “Whenwe find out what justice is, we shall require the just man to answer thedescription precisely… or shall we be content if he approximates to it very closely…?”

My passion for writing and reading noir fictionis no secret. The emergence of the hard-boiled hero in 1920s America and itssubsequent evolution in the 30s/40s was a direct response to British crimefiction and a world steeped in disillusionment after the First World War. AsRaymond Chandler said in The Simple Art of Murder, the genre wanted toexplore realistic crime and a world where “gangsters can rule nations andalmost rule cities.”

But what is justice when the very system thatshould uphold it is corrupt? This is a question that many hard-boiled heroeshave grappled with, often choosing to leave the system they once served due toits inherent corruption.

Chandler added that, “Down these mean streets aman must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”Across the genre, its heroes, from Marlowe to Spenser, Millhone to Rebus andBosch et al., operate more as dark knights. A white knight can’t exist in theworld of Noir. However, I say these heroes are the answer to Plato’s musing;They might not be able to “answer the description precisely”, but they“approximate to it very closely.”

This is one of the many aspects I love aboutnoir fiction and why I love writing it. When I approached my novel BadBlood, I kept asking myself: What does it mean to be good in a bent world?How can one be hopeful in a wasteland? And I let my protagonist try to find hisway to those answers.

Crime fiction, generally, grapples with anunjust world, but noir fiction knows there is no cure. Crime isn’t a virus thatcan be eradicated, and surviving in that reality is no easy business! As PhilipMarlowe says toward the end of The Big Sleep, “Me, I was part of the nastinessnow.”