Lee Horsley

At The Rap Sheet, novelist Megan Abbott interviewed Lee Horsley, Senior Lecturer in English at the Lancaster University. Her publications include the newly released The Noir Thriller, Political Fiction and the Historical Imagination (1990), and Fictions of Power in English Literature 1900-1950 (1995) as well as recent articles on crime fiction published in Clues and Modern Fiction Studies. Part of the interview:

MA: You point out that in the 1930s novels, noir characters’ fates are consistently dictated by economic hardship, while in the post-World War II period, fate is determined by difference--characters feeling out of place or alienated. In contrast, you write, in 1980s and ’90s noir, rather than being lured into an enticing underbelly, protagonists are seduced by the promise of a commodity-rich lifestyle (e.g., Bret Easton Ellis, Elmore Leonard, Charles Willeford’s Hoke Mosley novels). What is the role of economics in more recent noir? Has there has been another shift?

LH: Again, you’re effectively prompting me to think through my arguments. In my reading of 21st-century noir, I was most struck by a pervasive preoccupation with the performance of gender roles. But if I revisit the texts I chose to discuss there, I can also, of course, see prominent economic themes running through all of them. In Charlie Huston’s Caught Stealing, Hank [Thompson]’s ordeal is set in motion by money--a quest for a “fabulous object” modeled on The Maltese Falcon--and Huston ultimately allows money to transform things for his long-suffering protagonist. In your own Queenpin, the spectacular female performances are part of a power struggle, but the novel is also a potent tale of the protagonist’s desperation to escape impoverished origins.

So--yes, the role of economics is still strongly apparent, as it has been (in one way or another) through the whole of literary and cinematic noir. But the emphasis does shift, and I think that probably, in the new millennium, crime writers have to some extent become less preoccupied with the Thatcher-Reagan era and its impact on the economic life of both Britain and America. In talking to one of my postgraduates about his dissertation this summer, I thought he’d come up with an interesting observation about some of the political novels of the ’90s, in which he argued that there was a Gothic sense of entrapment by the economic crimes of the ’80s. Novels like [Iain Banks’] Complicity and [Ellis’] American Psycho are particularly striking in this respect, with violence spiraling out of an economic context that is also harshly satirized.

It is this satire of economic perfidy, I think, that is largely absent from the 21st-century noir I have read. Greed and savage competition are taken for granted as part of the circumstances governing life, but our attention isn’t focused on the metaphoric significance of the various forms of consumption, acquisitiveness, and materialism represented. At its most extreme, satire of this kind can be seen, for example, in the Swiftian tactics of Ellis’ novel, profoundly disturbing in its accumulation of commodities and consumers, anti-aging eye balm and honey almond body scrub, Soprani jackets, Ralph Lauren shirts and “a tie from Agnes B. still covered with flecks of someone’s blood.” However ... given that I’ve just come across a Neutrogena/Nivea advertising feature on Amazon called “So you’d like to ... have the American Psycho facial treatment,” one has to wonder yet again about...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue