Not long ago a few of us mystery writing types were mentioned and quoted in an L.A. Times article, "Diverse Realities of Mysteries" by Anne-Marie O’Connor. The piece was built on the notion of the new noir as interpreted by the likes of Paula Woods, Naomi Hirahara, Denise Hamilton, Marcos McPeek Villatoro, Walter Mosley, Michael Connelly and yours truly. Writers who are of color and/or who write about, as Connelly expressed, "...writers want to get involved in social investigations and social reflection, where we’re going as a society and where we’ve been."

The article assumed a common definition of noir that may or not be shared among readers, viewers and writers. The term comes from the cinema, film noir, referring to a certain kind of movie populated with, often, low lifes and hustlers. Writer-director Paul Schrader in a 1972 essay maintained that the noir cycle starts with the 1941 "Maltase Falcon" and ends with 1958’s "Touch of Evil." Both films are based on novels. The Maltese Falcon was published in 1930 by Dashiell Hammett and Badge of Evil, the basis for "Touch," was published in 1956 by Wade Miller writing as Whit Masterson.

Schrader argued that film noir is not a genre, that’s it’s not defined like a western or gangster story by setting or conflicts but by tone and mood. Consider then Schrader’s 1976 "Taxi Driver" with the mentally unbalanced Travis Bickel looking for purpose who through his delusions sets himself on a mission to save a pubescent hooker. Or his 1974 "Yakuza" written with his brother, and starring one of noir’s icons, Robert Mitchum. Big Bob’s Harry Kilmer returns to Japan where he’d been a military cop after WWII to search for a friend’s kidnapped daughter only to discover what he believed to be the past, was not.

Look too at the Schrader directed 1978 "Blue Collar," wherein three working stiffs, two black guys and one white guy, decide to rob their union, unwittingly uncovering labor corruption. As the story unfolds, and the buddies have been through hell, there’s a powerful ending scene of Richard Pryor as Zeke and Harvey Kitel as Jerry cursing racial epithets at each other, ready to tear the other one apart.

Are these not examples of characters trapped sucked into fatalistic depths for which they have little or no control attempting to find their way back? Isn’t that part of what defines noir?

Another example is the Edgar winning The Confession by Domenic Stansberry. The story is narrated by Jake Danser, a forensic psychologist. Danser’s job is interviewing criminals, and is an expert witness who testifies in court as to his subjects’ culpabilities, exposing their sins as it were. Danser’s sin is that he’s an adulterer and is wooing and bedding various women while dong his best to hide this from his wife. He is also, it would seem, a rapist and a murderer. Danser doesn’t come right out and say that he is the doer of these vile deeds, but there’s certainly a lot of damning coincidences following this man around in the book. More than one woman he’s been squiring suddenly winds up strangled and he convieniently keeps having these blackouts – or so he says.

He is the classic demented noir character driven by twisted deep-seated obsessions he can’t or won’t control. But Stansberry is clever in his portrayal of Danser for at times it would appear that the despicable protagonist of the Confession is playing a coy game with us the reader. He only lets us know so much, and tells us he’s skipping over a detail or two.

Publishers Weekly called The Confession neo-noir, meaning like noir? near noir? or new noir? A noir defined in the world post the collapse of Enron and bilked pensioner and alleged atrocities by our soldiers in Iraq. Woody Haut posits there’s a neon noir (Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction). That is crime fiction from the mid-1960s to the 1990s, and places the genre (his word) in a political perspective.

Luc Sante said that "Noir isn’t crime so much as it’s existentialist dilemma." Which suggests that you can have all sorts of noir across genres. There is western noir as embodied by the "Badlanders," a spurs and saddles version of the earlier urban film the "Asphalt Jungle," based on W.R. Burnett’s heist novel of the same name.

There’s also been science fiction noir. "Blade Runner," based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, is sweating paranoid circuitry beeping noir. The main character, Deckard, a kind of detective-assassin, is not only tormented by his work of hunting down and eliminating replicants, but comes to suspect he is also an artificial construct. Thus a riff on the noir trope wherein the main character discovers after getting beat, kicked and shot, he’s the killer, and he’s been chasing himself.

In the recently released Four Kinds of Rain by Robert Ward, the main character is another head shrinker in need of his own head getting shrunk, Bob Wells, psychologist. He’s after, and haunted by, the ceremonial mask of Utu. And films like "Wonderland," about the doomed life of porn star John Holmes, and "Brick" -- Hammett meets "Dawson’s Creek" – confirm that noir, whatever it is, is nowhere near finished.

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