Ryan Lindsay, an exceptional writer from Down Under had gotten "noir" defined pitch perfectly! Be sure to check it out in his new book entitled IN TEN CITY. Several chapters can be seen at his website (www.stinkbrown.org).
IN TEN CITY is a novel that I have written that is set in the seedier side of Australian life. It's not gangsters and major league crime, it's just bad people doing bad things in a small Aussie town. It centres around a high school teacher who has been having a bit of an illicit affair, with an eighteen year old girl at his school, and the daughter of one of his colleagues. The girl in question goes missing and it leads him to the Wagon's Hitch, the local caravan park where every low life and mouth breather ends up plodding through their day to day existence with drugs, sexual perversion, and all of the other things you fill your days with when you have no education, no job, no prospects and no want to actually improve your station in life. The teacher, Macbeth, gets tied up with what passes for a crime lord in the Wagon, Ares. Ares is a transient who doesn't have a complete past and who has made sure that the minions in this town respect him, or in the very least do what he wants.
What follows is a game of cat and mouse that sees an undercover cop in Ares' ranks, a town where the youth are being corrupted by Ares and his devious ways, and Macbeth's journey to just try and find this girl he's lost because he thought it was the only good thing in his life.
I love noir because I find it has an edge to its style that most other genres can't or won't offer. Noir is unashamed in its dark and openly gruesome appraoch to life. And people are like this, they are out there. They make bad decisions, or more likely, get stuck in these bad situations, and it is interesting to see what they will do to get themselves out of that situation. Noir gives you a chance to see the underbelly of so many scenes. I like that approach because it fits my world view very well. It fits my writing style. The hero is not always squeaky clean, he doesn't always do the right thing. Noir lets your characters be human and flawed. Noir lets the fun run like blood from a bullet hole.
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