ABSTRACT
The noir city of Hollywood’s thrillers of the 1940s and early 1950s is a shadow realm of crime and dislocation in which benighted individuals do battle with implacable threats and temptations.1 Often a little too conveniently framed as a symptomatic response to the cultural and social upheavals besetting the US after the Second World War-the nuclear age, the Cold War and homefront anticommunism, the adjustment to a postwar economic order-film noir’s resonant scenarios of fear, persecution, and disjunction actually began to appear before the US entered the war. Film noir also inherited many of its narrative and stylistic features, and much of its urban atmosphere, from the hard-boiled pulp fiction of the interwar period (Krutnik, 1991 33-44). Looking back from the vantage-point of 1950, Raymond Chandler suggested that the postwar climate was responsible for feeding, not breeding, the ‘smell of fear’ generated by the pulp crime stories:
Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine-gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night
(Chandler, 1973b:7)
These ‘hard-boiled chronicles of mean streets’ (Chandler 1973a: 196) were first published in Black Mask magazine, shortly after the 1920 census revealed that over 50 per cent of the American population now lived in cities.2 Howard Chudacoff credits this finding with symbolic importance, implying that the city had supplanted the farm as ‘the locus of national experience’ (Chudacoff, 1975:179).
