|
 |
|
| |
"Black" Block, or radical noir
Conversation with
Lawrence Block and Otto Penzler |
|
|
| |
|
| 08/12/2011 |
|
|
|
The definition of noir literature has been a longtime point of discussion. New York-based writer-editor Otto Penzler (founder of The Mysterious Press publishing company) tried to give an answer here in Courmayeur, where he is presenting his new anthology, The Best American Noir of the Century, edited with James Ellroy and published by Newton & Compton. He was flanked by Lawrence Block, who is at the Festival both as a jury member and to present A Drop of the Hard Stuff, the newest adventure of his ex-cop and recovering alcoholic, Matthew Scudder.
Says Penzler: 'Like with porn, it’s hard to say what noir is. I tried to describe it in this book, but we have to remember that it’s niche literature, it’s a sub-genre of crime literature. I think that even writers like Chandler and Hammett can’t be considered entirely genre writers. Their characters are ‘heroic knights,’ they try to recreate order, they never give up their grasp regardless of what happens to them, and they tend to reach their goals, even if the goal isn’t always clean. Noir is different – it carries a negative fate within it. There are no heroes, all the characters are destined to fail.” Penzler’s position may even be too radical, as he includes in noir literature novels like Anna Karenina, on the grounds that 'the genre was not only born in the United States, there’s a lot of it in English, Russian and French literature as well.” And he excludes The Maltese Falcon, 'a film shot as if it were noir, with a specific style, but even there, Sam Spade is a hero, and even when things are tough he always manages to do the right thing.”
Penzler also excludes a majority of Block’s work from the genre (although the latter’s 1998 short story “Like a Bone in the Throat” is included in the anthology), because even his characters are often heroes. These opinions, naturally, do not have an exclusively systematic or aesthetic value.
The question of what is and isn’t noir doesn’t bother Block all that much. “My only anxiety,” he says, “is how the story’s coming alone and what still has to happen.” Block moves freely among the genres: the Matthew Scudder series are pretty dark, but style is lighter in the Bernie Rhodenbarr series, almost like romance lit (as Andrea G. Pinketts said, who presented the two Americans with John Vignola, but will soon be presenting his own book here, Depilando Pilar). When he writes, Block says he has no idea if the main character will be the protagonist of a series or not. 'In Rhodenbarr’s case, the second novel came almost by itself. With Scudder, I wrote the first three books immediately, but I also wrote a novel in which the main characters were five ex-soldiers who had no problem breaking the law in order to fix things. The book was successful, but when the editor asked me to write a follow-up I realized that the characters didn’t belong to me, and I let them go.”
It’s not always easy finding inspiration, says Block: 'I’ve never been to Alcoholics Anonymous, which Scudder frequents and which is the core of A Drop of the Hard Stuff, but I can talk about when I was in a Los Angeles and had no idea what I would do. I only know how to write, but I couldn’t finish any of my stories. I even thought about changing work, but I have no other skills, so I thought I could try crime. Excluding murders, what I could be was a burglar, so I tried breaking into my own apartment. This experience gave me the idea of writing a story about Bernie Rhodenbarr, the gentleman burglar.”
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
