The Cult interview Hard Case author Christa Faust (whose Money Shot is seriously good):
Drawing a line from Chandler and Hammett to the crime writers of today, what’s changed about the genre? And how do you remain faithful to the trappings while updating it for a modern audience?
Well, on the surface it seems like the big change is the explicitness of violence and sex, but I don’t think that’s exactly true. Back in their day, the Black Mask-era writers were considered extremely base and vulgar, both shockingly violent and outrageously sexy. Their stories featured realistic scenes involving criminals and underworld denizens who spoke in the unvarnished vernacular of the street. The heroes were often nearly indistinguishable from the villains and the authors defended these stories as much more honest and real than the milder, more genteel traditional mysteries.
While society’s standards for what is considered “shockingly violent” have certainly changed in a progressive kind of moral inflation, on average the modern noir genre remains at approximately the same level above the acceptable norm as it has been in decades past. Noir authors today make that exact same argument; that the violence, sex and crude language in their books is simply an unflinching, realistic view of the world around us. I think they are just as right now as their predecessors were back then.
As far as updating the genre for a modern reader, I think you need to start with genuine love and respect for what came before. I don’t like books that are written with a campy nudge-and-wink, referring to the genre clichés while remaining above it all with a self-consciously retro kind of meta-ironic hipness. I prefer authors that tell the classic noir stories of betrayal and desperation in modern settings, populating them with flawed, complex characters that modern readers can relate to.
First posted: Thursday, September 4th, 2008.
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