Musings on Noir Heroes; guest post from Luke Deckard

Luke Deckard is a thoughtful member of the new generation of crime writers, a generation which I'm keen to encourage whenever I can. So I was glad to include a short story of his in the forthcoming CWA anthology Midsummer Mysteries. His new novel Bad Blood, a Logan Bishop thriller, has just been published, and to celebrate this, I invited him to contribute a guest blog post. Here it is:

'In Plato’s The Republic, he writes, “When we find out what justice is, we shall require the just man to answer the description precisely… or shall we be content if he approximates to it very closely…?”

My passion for writing and reading noir fiction is no secret. The emergence of the hard-boiled hero in 1920s America and its subsequent evolution in the 30s/40s was a direct response to British crime fiction and a world steeped in disillusionment after the First World War. As Raymond Chandler said in The Simple Art of Murder, the genre wanted to explore realistic crime and a world where “gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities.”

But what is justice when the very system that should uphold it is corrupt? This is a question that many hard-boiled heroes have grappled with, often choosing to leave the system they once served due to its inherent corruption.

Chandler added that, “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” Across the genre, its heroes, from Marlowe to Spenser, Millhone to Rebus and Bosch et al., operate more as dark knights. A white knight can’t exist in the world of Noir. However, I say these heroes are the answer to Plato’s musing; They might not be able to “answer the description precisely”, but they “approximate to it very closely.”

This is one of the many aspects I love about noir fiction and why I love writing it. When I approached my novel Bad Blood, I kept asking myself: What does it mean to be good in a bent world? How can one be hopeful in a wasteland? And I let my protagonist try to find his way to those answers.

Crime fiction, generally, grapples with an unjust world, but noir fiction knows there is no cure. Crime isn’t a virus that can be eradicated, and surviving in that reality is no easy business! As Philip Marlowe says toward the end of The Big Sleep, “Me, I was part of the nastiness now.”