From Politics to the Roman Noir

What constitutes a roman noir? At its heart, there's quite a distance between, say, the cynical investigations of the original "hard-boiled" detectives (Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler), the clashes in the "underworld" typical of the mobster novels (William Riley Burnett, Auguste Le Breton or Albert Simonin), or the social or political crises evoked by the neo-detective novel. Their only point in common: criminality, violence—and above all their causes and consequences.

In this respect, the roman noir and the mystery novel are opposed: the conclusion of the mystery novel celebrates the triumph of convention because the guilty party is found, punished, and social order is restored. By contrast, the roman noir calls that order into question. There is of course a murder, but it is motivated, and becomes in a way a pretext: what's more important than the crime is the road that leads to the crime, and its implications. Fifty years ago, Raymond Chandler illustrated this idea when he wrote that the roman noir, "returns the murder to the category of individuals who commit it for real reasons, and not only in order to provide the reader with a cadaver."¹

Thus the themes entwine with one another to give a particularity to the roman noir. And one can say that the roman noir—sometimes called "polar," a parasynonym, is produced when there is a plot based on a crime or an offense, along with the expression of an anxiety—not an individual one but usually social—an anxiety expressed through violence which leads to a pessimistic or indeed hopeless vision of the world.

Within this rather relaxed plot-line the roman noir is protean, despite its relatively short history, appearing in the 1920's in the US and in 1945 with the creation of Gallimard's Série Noire in France.

One of its latest incarnations displays an interest in the political which becomes a novelistic theme par excellence with the success of Jean-Patrick Manchette's (1942-1995) "neo-polar." Influenced by American writers of the roman noir, Manchette and other authors during this period of social crisis (the events of May 1968) use this model which virulently denounces social problems.² The work of Manchette, begun at the start of the 1970's, is foundational because of the link between the politicization of the roman noir and the questioning of the act of writing: the two are inextricably linked to his conception of the genre and of literature as expressed in his press releases and interviews (now published by Rivages/Noir). He states: "The polar for me, was—and still is—the novel of violent social intervention. I set off in that direction encouraged also by my experience as a leftist."³

For Manchette, inventor of the expression "neo-polar" in 1979, this "literature of crisis"⁴ is above all not a detective novel. The "neo-polar" "echos the striking reappearance of History on the torn up streets of Paris and elsewhere."⁵ What characterizes it is first a particular tone where violence and dark realism dominate. This violence has as its target society in its entirety: political corruption, social injustice, the all-powerfulness of the well-off and the weakness of individuals are its major themes during the 1970's. Sociologically, the fascination with the "neo-polar" appears as a new, comfortable, form of critique—at once individual and distanced—which satisfies readers who can then move "from the question of engagement as the kernel of social critique to complex forms of distanciation."⁶

The rise to power of the Left (Mitterand, 1981) marks the end of this period but the "neo-polar," whose referential and mostly political reach is now in favor, had a lasting influence on the noir genre in France. Just as the "hard-boiled" detective was a constitutive element of the genre at the beginning of the century, the theme of social criticism becomes significant in France during the last decades. To such an extent that Les Temps modernes, which devoted an issue to the roman noir in 1997, offered an editorial article arguing that the...