by Writing Workshops Staff
56 minutes ago
Going Back to the Well: Keeping Noir Alive in the 21st Century
By Tom Andes
James Ellroy is one of the reasons I write fiction.
When I read White Jazz in college, it excited me in a way none of the more so-called serious literary fiction I was reading in my other classes did. The language was direct, immediate, almost like a police blotter. The stakes were as high as they could be: corruption at the top of the Los Angeles Police Department. And the characters were amazing. In the first three chapters, Ellroy's protagonist, Dave Klein, takes a bribe to throw a federal witness out a window, and you learn the guy is in love with his sister.
Reading about bad people doing bad things, then seeking redemption because they want out of a broken, corrupt system — that remains central to what I loved about Ellroy's L.A. Quartet, the four novels he published between 1987 and 1992: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz.
So much of making art is about influence, about what we do with the things we consume and how we remake them. Just as Ellroy updated noir for the 1990s, the genre in general has survived because people keep going back to the well. That's the premise of Writing the New Noir, the eight-week workshop I'm teaching this August, and it's worth explaining what I mean by it.
In the 1960s, the married Swedish writers Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö co-authored ten Martin Beck novels. Using the form of the police procedural, they traced Beck's disillusionment with police work while autopsying bourgeois Swedish society from a socialist perspective. They helped birth Scandinavian noir. Similarly, in the 1970s, Jean-Patrick Manchette used Dashiell Hammett's novels as a template for his situationist noirs, a post-1968 intervention in bourgeois French society that helped repopularize the genre there.
More recently, on this side of the Atlantic, Sara Paretsky updated the PI novel with her female series character, V.I. Warshawski. Since then, writers like Vicki Hendricks, Laura Lippman, and Megan Abbott have brought the genre into the 21st century by shifting the focus away from men and toward the relationships between women. Likewise, Walter Mosley and Attica Locke have written great genre novels that center Black characters and land as powerful political interventions.
Noir has always existed in a strange space both within and outside the mainstream of American writing. It combines elements of both so-called high and low art. From Drive to cyberpunk, from Michael Mann's Heat to most of Scorsese's output, from Godard to Kurosawa, its style and aesthetic remain a distinctive influence in movies as well as literature. In writing, while it's hard to say who influenced whom, the clipped style of Hammett and Spillane has left a mark on American literature as surely as Hemingway's famed terse style. Faulkner, likewise, was influenced by gothic literature, which in its doomed romanticism is another precursor to noir. We can see noir's influence in contemporary literary writers like Ottessa Moshfegh, whose Eileen recalls Patricia Highsmith.
Of course, the genre also carries a lot of baggage, having been dominated by white male writers whose work often leans on misogynistic and racist tropes. The criticism is valid: sometimes noir glorifies a particular kind of experience, or a particular brutality, in the name of realism.
I'm leery of using the word woke, given how thoroughly it's been co-opted as a political epithet. So I want to be clear that when I say Jordan Harper's A Violent Masterpiece reads like a woke update of James Ellroy, I mean it in the best possible way. Harper grafts his own preoccupations onto Ellroy's three-protagonist structure, telling the story of livestreaming crime-scene journalist Jake Deal, high-end concierge Kara Delgado, and lawyer Doug Gibson, all of whom work as fixers and gofers for Hollywood's elite. At the center of the book is a character almost certainly inspired by Jeffrey Epstein. He's busted. And because he's in a position to bring other powerful people down with him, the machine turns against him.
Like Ellroy's great L.A. novels, Harper's great L.A. novel deals with complicity, its characters finding redemption by standing up to a system they once helped support and were, to various extents, part of. But where Ellroy's heroes are dirty cops, Harper's are low-level fixers — procurers who know they're part of something awful and are just trying to get by. The tenor of their complicity is different, and because his characters stand outside the law, the book examines power in a very different way: ruthless, exacting.
Noir is nothing if not a tradition, and it's one of the most influential and enduring literary traditions in American — and for that matter, world — literature. Yet for all its pretense to gritty realism, the traditional detective story was not realism, as Raymond Chandler observed in his essay "The Simple Art of Murder." Chandler was making the case that hardboiled writers such as Hammett introduced a dose of psychological realism into their stories, making them not so much clever puzzles as examinations of particular kinds of psychology and power. He wanted to take the detective story out of the parlor, and that is still what so much writing in the nebulously defined noir genre aims to do.
That still describes what I love about this genre. Is it mere entertainment? Well, as Chandler says, any reading we do involves an element of escapism. Yet in its preoccupation with power, corruption, and the material conditions that create crime, the best noir offers a level of sociopolitical examination few other genres do.
That's probably why so many great small magazines dedicated to reinventing the genre — to using it to think about America from the bottom up — have sprung into being over the last decade. Two of my favorites are Rock and a Hard Place and Dark Yonder. And if you comb the pages of any recent volume of The Best American Mystery and Suspense, you'll find people doing exciting work that keeps the genre fresh and alive. A few off the top of my head: C.W. Blackwell, S.A. Cosby, Meagan Lucas, Rob D. Smith. But there are so many more.
That, to me, is what it means to engage with a tradition. A lot of the great innovators in noir, as in any genre, have innovated out of a desire to course-correct, and out of love for the literature that made them the writers they are. Whether we're writing noir, traditional mysteries, or something adjacent that borrows the style and the aesthetic, we get to go to what James Sallis described as the great buffet table that is literature and choose what works for us.
Write your own noir this fall.
Writing the New Noir is an eight-week generative workshop with Tom Andes, beginning Monday, August 24, 2026. We'll spend the first four weeks reading contemporary practitioners and building new work through generative exercises, then move into a full workshop where every writer gets a story on the table. Mondays, 8–10 PM Eastern. Limited to 12 writers.
Tom Andes is the author of the detective novel Wait There Till You Hear from Me (Crescent City Books, 2025). His stories have appeared in The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025, The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2025, Best American Mystery Stories 2012, and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. He lives in Albuquerque, where he works as a musician and freelance editor.
