At the beginning of the twentieth century, in the 1920s, such a genre as noir was formed in American mass literature. This name comes from the French word noir - "black", which perfectly characterizes this direction.
Distinctive features of noir
A similar genre of hard-boiled fiction already existed, which can be translated as a “cool-boiled” crime novel. Such works have a tense, action-filled plot and a special style of narration - rough and sharp.
But in hard-boiled fiction novels, the main character is usually a stereotypically positive character - it can be a journalist or a detective investigating the case. In noir works, in the center of events is the criminal himself, the suspect, or, which is much less common, the victim of the crime.
Noir was considered a rather mediocre and low genre due to the abundance of various slang, overly cruel realism and cynicism.
One of the founders of the black novel is American writer and screenwriter Samuel Dashil Hammett.
Biography
Deshil Hammett was born on May 27, 1894 in the county of St. Mary in the US state of Maryland, but the future writer spent his childhood in Baltimore and Philadelphia. He served in the army and fought for some time in the First World War, but later fell ill with tuberculosis, which forced Deshil Hammett to leave the front. After the war, Hammett married, but the marriage soon broke up.
Great influence on his work had a job. Between 1915 and 1921, Dashil Hammett was a private detective at the Pinkerton Agency. Based on the experience gained during the investigations, the writer created his works. Thanks to this, they turned out to be realistic, reliable and correct in terms of logic.
In the 1950s, the writer was arrested as a political prisoner. After living 67 years, Dashil Hammett died in a New York hospital on January 10, 1967. In the last years of his life, he was deeply depressed, suffering from alcoholism and the consequences of tuberculosis, which seriously undermined his health. Despite fame and popularity, the writer died in solitude and poverty.
Creation
For the first time, under the name Peter Collinson, a story was published telling about the nameless detective of the Continental detective agency - the author and Pinkerton agency became the prototypes of the character and his place of work.
In the future, about two dozen more stories were written about this hero and his investigation. A few years later, the stories were combined and began to be published in the form of the novels “The Curse of the Dane” and “Bloody Harvest”.
The most popular novel that brought fame to Dashil Hammett is The Maltese Falcon, whose main character is also an operative. This time, the author gave the character the name Sam Spade. The hero appeared in other books of Hammett - “A man whose name is Spade”, “There were too many of them” and “They can hang you only once.”
Dashil Hammett used innovative literary techniques, many of which later became classic cliches. Sam Spade's personality also served as the basis on which other writers created their characters. For example, Raymond Chandler’s hero Philip Marlowe is in many ways similar to the Maltese Falcon detective.
Sam Spade is energetic and aggressive, like all the heroes in Hammett's works, but his image is not caricatured or hyperbolic. The character is carefully designed by the writer to the smallest detail, down to the manner of speaking.
Criticism and influence on American culture
After the publication of the novel The Maltese Falcon, which was later named The Best American Detective of All Time, the writer received recognition from critics and readers. He was compared to Ernest Hemingway. The accuracy of the style, laconicism and believability of the events described were noted. Deshil Hammett was able to create intrigue and correctly build the plot.