Great Noir Lives—and Dies—on Dialogue

Bowie placed the shotgun on the ground and picked up the .22 rifle. “I always wanted one of these little guns when I was a kid,” he said.

“That time they got me in Florida,” Chicamaw said, “and sent me back to Oklahoma was just my fault. That landlady was going with me and just got a little reckless. I wish I knew where that woman was. She wasn’t no spring chicken, but I’ll take her to anything you could ever show me.”

“How come them to ever get you down there?”

“I had a run-in with a Jew down there in a gambling place. I don’t mind telling you.”

In the 1937 crime noir Thieves Like Us, Bowie, Chicamaw and T-Dub escape Oklahoma State Penitentiary, “a desperate trio,” as a newspaper story in the book describes them. The book’s author, Edward Anderson, seems to have know whereof he spoke; he was a deckhand, boxer, newspaperman fired for anti-semitism, a drunk, according to the Los Angeles Times, and, the article notes, celebrated by the Saturday Review of Literature in 1933 as “an heir” to Faulkner and Hemingway.

Thieves like Us gained fame. In it, one of the desperados is convicted murderer, the two others bank robbers and habitual thugs. They lurch, stolen getaway car-to-getaway-care, fetid safe-house-safe-house, and from one herky-jerky conversation to the next.

Yes, they are on the run, pursued. But the real tension comes from how they talk. In the scene I began with, Chicamaw rambles about the drunken misadventure that landed him in jail.

“I got too smart and went back there the next Sunday and there was more Laws on me than I thought there was in Miami,” he said.

“A man out to stay sober Out Here,” Bowie said.

“What are you trying to do, preach to me?”

“’Course not, Chicamaw.”

Chicamaw took another drink.

This likely goes without saying: great noir—defined here as a rich tradition with many purveyors, but perhaps most quintessentially captured by Jim Thompson, who used plain speak and character nuance to turn crime books to literature—lives and dies on dialogue. Thieves Like Us, while perhaps not heralded as among the greats, uses character exchanges to accomplish the powerful aim of leaving the reader uncertain what will be the thieves ultimate undoing. Will the Laws get them or will they collide of their own entropy, stepping over a delicate line of mutual desperation and dependence into the meanness that brought them here?

But what that assertion masks is a troubling challenge for today’s writers: does the audience have the patience for obtuse exchanges, often with little direct connection to plot?

While the answer is doubtless yes—some audiences love and embrace this truly human story-telling—I would argue that the mass market today craves plot and pace anathema to the meandering dialogue that makes great noir great. Maybe the cell phone is to blame. When you could read a book on the porch swing uninterrupted, there was more patience for hot air as window into soul. Maybe dialogue like this makes a book feel more like literature than a thrill-ride. Or maybe it’s just too damn hard to pull it off the way the greats once did.

That slow-ratchet character-driven plot momentum comes at a cost. For it to work, characters must speak the way characters speak, and the meaning of every exchange may not be clear, like when one of the thieves getaway cars break down and they have to get it off the road and out of sight.

“Get her off the highway,” T-Dub said. “Goose her. Gentlemen, this wins the fur-lined bathtub.”

Bowie, T-Dub, and Little Man pushed, their feet clopping on the pavement like horses. At last they reached the crossroads and they pushed the car up over the hump and out of the sight of the highway.

Chicamaw started trying Little Man. T-Dub breathed like he had asthma. “I’ve had plenty of tough teaty in my day, but this is the toughest. I might as well turn this .38 on me and do it up right.”

Yeah, I take this issue personally. I get occasional reviews of my fiction and nonfiction that reflect on seemingly obtuse character exchanges. They are deliberate, for better or worse. In my latest, The Man Who Wouldn’t Die, I set out to write a comedic noir that spoofs Silicon Valley but still uses a hardboiled, plain-spoken detective as the one sane man in a town gone bat-shit with greed. The character only works if he talks how he talks, and sometimes not every gun, or mention thereof, is a clear plot device. Don’t introduce a prop you don’t intend to use? This notion goes out the window when dialogue becomes central to the slow burn. Sometimes the gun, or its mention is not even a McGuffin. It’s just something someone mentions. How much responsibility does a writer have to stay on point in a world where attention span is short?

My college degree, believe it or not, was in Rhetoric. Yes, the cheap joke goes, a B.A. in B.S., from the University of California at Berkeley. Where else? I was drawn to the degree because I loved language and making the case with words; the study of rhetoric turned my word lust into lifelong romance. The Great Rhetoricians of old believed that 99 percent of what we say is actually an argument, often tacit, heavily veiled, but an argument nonetheless, an act of subtly steering a conversation, coercing agreement, creating an alliance. This I no longer doubt. Ever listen to a married couple talk about how they met? Or a conversation with a boss? Every sentence, and tone, carries weight, however light.

What does this have to do with noir? Everything. In the greatest crime fiction, exchanges become the plot. They make a case that builds, behaving much more than mere character expositions and, as a result, much more intense than the mass-market version of black-and-white exchanges that I’ve been guilty of writing myself plenty of times. By contrast, the noir leaves the reader with a purposeful lack of direction, an uncertainty about which human being on the pages might break. By the end, I had no clue how these thieves would meet their maker.

“Them politicians are thieves just like us,” T-Dub said. “Only they got more sense and use their damned tongues instead of a gun.”

“If you ever need a mouthpiece,” Chicamaw said, “Old Windy wouldn’t be bad.”

“I’m not needing any more lawyers myself,” T-Dub said. “The way I figure is that when they get me again I won’t be in any shape for a lawyer or anything else in this world to do me any good.”

“That’s me,” Bowie said. “I mean to get me out of any new trouble.”

“Well, the way I figure it,” Chicamaw said, “is that two and two make five and if you at first you don’t suck seed, keep on sucking ‘til you do suck seed.”

“Aw, you damned Indian,” Bowie said.

This precious last exchange captures the whole of the rich conundrum of talking as a bunch of outlaws well might.

Chicamaw says: “If you ever need a mouthpiece, Old Windy wouldn’t be bad.” This comment, coming out of nowhere, requires a neural-hike by the reader to grasp that he’s referring to a lawyer, in language implicitly critical of the legal trade but also in recognition of the helpless position these thieves may find themselves in. T-Dub’s response leaves lots to the imagination, but all of it violent: will he kill himself, the cops, go down in a firefight?

Then, at the end of all this fraught, violent but subtle dialogue, Bowie brings the scene to an eerie calm with racism. “Aw, you damned Indian.” It’s practically comforting in the context.

This is beautiful stuff, if you’re into filling in the dots, or writing your master’s thesis in rhetoric. But it defies the entertainment convention of a world conditioned by tight plots, a guaranteed surprise twist, and in which succinct semantic machismo carries the day.

So can a mass audience meet this dialogue halfway? I can only answer as might have some noir writer of old might: I God damn doubt it but who gives a pig’s whistle?

We can’t control what they read, just what we write. Courage, siblings. Thieves like us should keep stealing their attention, one gritty line at a time.