AUTHOR’S NOTE
Sometime during my twenties I fell in love with noir. I saw the classic films of the genre and devoured the works of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain. The fascination remained but, although I wrote in a lot of different genres, I never tried to write a mystery.
That changed in the summer of 2008.
My wife, Roxanna, who had the questionable sense to marry me in 2000 but whose love and support has made so much of my writing possible, didn’t know much about noir as a genre. I introduced her to it: We watched The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Out of the Past, Pickup on South Street, and countless lesser-known noir films until we’d all but exhausted the canon. She, like me, fell in love with it: She went out, scoured the web, and found a couple dozen more.
I’ve been a playwright for about thirty years and so, as a valentine to her (and to the writers, actors, directors, and cinematographers who noir-ized our lives), I wrote Noir(ish), as a play. (As I write this, it hasn’t been produced, but it has received staged readings at two festivals and won two national playwriting contests.)
I like the play, but writing for the stage has certain limitations: As a practical matter, you need to limit your cast size (the play calls for eight actors and a lot of doubling—the same actor playing two or three roles) and the physical requirements: They can land a helicopter on a Broadway stage or run a car over a cliff in a movie, but small theaters worry about both the space needed and the cost of creating the effects of, say, something like The Big Sleep.
So I decided to adapt the twenty-thousand-word play into a fifty-thousand-word novel so I could “open it up”: let it sprawl, so to speak, across the landscape of a fictional Los Angeles; give the story some color by adding more characters drawn from noir and providing a few details about them (Stoker Thompson, Madge Rapf, and Kathie Moffat, for example); and, most important, give the characters the physical attributes I wanted them to have. (In the book, for example, I’ve been able to make Dan Scott the behemoth I always envisioned him being; in staging the play, most theaters would have difficulty finding an actor that large.) I was also able to give Greenstreet a greater role in the proceedings; theaters, understandably, are wary of having animals on stage. But most of all, I was able to explore Robert Grahame’s psyche, make him more human and less just the “hard-boiled detective” of noir lore.
The first draft of the play took a month to write. The first draft of the novel, eight weeks. Plays tell their stories through dialogue, but novels need “narrative.” Finding ways to create the details of those people and places I saw and to describe them in interesting and (I hope) exciting words was the greatest challenge. It was also a heck of a lot of fun.
One note: The play and the novel are both dedicated to Lizabeth Scott, a wonderful actress deserving of far more recognition, whose performance in the noir classic Too Late for Tears informs the characters of Lizabeth Duryea (who is named for her) and Gloria Mitchum in the novel. I sent her a copy of the play; she sent me back a lovely thank-you note. Miss Scott, thank you, from the bottom of my hard-boiled heart.
If you enjoy the exploits of hard-boiled detectives like Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, or the soft-boiled ones like Thursday Next, I think you’ll find Robert Grahame and the dilemmas he faces in Noir(ish) an unusual and entertaining combination of the two.
Evan Guilford-Blake
Dutton Guilt Edged Mysteries