Providence Noir (Akashic Noir)
Ann Hood
INTRODUCTION
CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS
Like so many things, it started with Sunday Afternoon at the Movies. It started with Barbara Stanwyck appearing at the top of a staircase wrapped in a towel and Fred MacMurray (Steve Douglas of My Three Sons!) making wisecracks and double entendres. It started with Double Indemnity. My grandmother Mama Rose in her faded pink chair, muttering in broken English. Me on the floor in front of the Zenith, munching scorched Jiffy Pop, transfixed.
“How could I know,” MacMurray as Walter Neff asks, “that murder sometimes smells like honeysuckle?” This is poetry, I thought. This is sex and mystery and murder. This, I later learned, is noir.
I was a kid who saved her allowance to buy Nancy Drew books, one a week. I read them in order, from The Secret of the Old Clock to The Mystery of the 99 Steps, lining them up on a shelf in my room. Their bright yellow bindings perfectly matched the yellow and white gingham bedspread and curtains. Everything about Nancy, Bess, and George was bright: their smiles, Nancy’s blue Roadster and her boyfriend Ned Nickerson. Even though the covers were meant to look spooky, Nancy always appeared with cherry-red lips and a blond flip hairdo, cast in a beam of light.
Noir was everything Nancy Drew wasn’t. From the moment Walter Neff arrived sweaty and wounded at his insurance office, I knew I had stepped into someplace new, someplace dark. I didn’t know then that Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, and all the other movies I watched on those long-ago Sunday afternoons with Mama Rose, had sprung from books. That, I learned later. And once I did, I devoured them. As an international flight attendant for TWA, I stuffed James Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler paperbacks into my fat crew bag, reading them on the jump seat at thirty-five thousand feet over the Atlantic as the passengers slept. This was the world of dames and hard-boiled men, of shadowy cities, of booze and cigarettes.
“Noir is about sex and money and sometimes about revenge,” Otto Penzler, the owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, told the New Yorker in 2010. In noir, he said, there are no heroes and no happy endings.
As often happens with literature, it finds you when you need it most. Those Sunday-afternoon movies helped move me from childhood to adolescence, away from Nancy Drew’s sunny life; they offered a glimpse of what was out there in the big world beyond my little town of West Warwick in the littlest state. The novels landed in my uniformed lap as my world began to unravel.
My brother Skip, my only sibling, died suddenly in 1982. His body was found facedown in a few inches of water in his bathtub in Pittsburgh. The screen in the window had a bullet hole in it. Safe deposit box keys were missing. There were drugs and footprints, a scorned fiancée, and an ex-wife. There had been arguments with both of them, and threats made. There was one witness: Skip’s Irish setter, Rogan. After a six-month investigation, the police determined his death was accidental, even though they could never connect the dots of the bullet hole or the missing keys or any of the other suspicious events and characters.
Refusing to accept the police report’s findings, my mother began going to psychics to solve the crime. Each one told her the same thing: he had been murdered by a dark-haired man in an army-green T-shirt. But who was this mysterious man? She stayed up nights trying to figure it out, to make sense of a thing that was senseless.
Me? I read noir fiction, fiction full of villains, not heroes. Fatalistic and desperate, the characters appealed to me and my broken, confused heart. Months passed, 1982 became 1983, and then one day I looked up and it was the twenty-first century. Whatever happened the night my brother died remains a mystery. But my love of noir continued to grow as I discovered Patricia Highsmith and new noir writers like Dennis Lehane.