Been reading Raymond Chandler lately. Quite racist in spots. Some of the best writing in English, however, technically speaking; beautiful stuff that takes my breath away when I read it. If you've got all your ideas of Chandler from Humphrey Bogart movies, well, you aren't horribly far off. Still, I'd highly recommend the writing…
One of the things I didn't realize about Chandler until I got his complete works a couple of years ago is that his famous Phillip Marlowe novels were almost all based on earlier novellas with substantially the same story and featuring his earlier detectives, principally John Dalmas and Ted Carmody. The Marlowizations mostly represent a fundamental refinement into "essence of noir". The more lighthearted comedy and stock characters are removed; the plots are complexified; Marlowe's habits and viewpoint are substituted. (Dalmas is very similar to Marlowe. Carmody is somewhat more ambiguous.)
In this refinement, we can see the direct purification of the noir genre as originated by Dashiell Hammett and his pulp contemporaries. OK, let's face it—no one could write like Hammett and Chandler. If your ideas of Hammett are based on the movie versions of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, you should really get his collected novels, of which there are sadly only a few.
Hammett's writing have a certain pulp brutality and straightforwardness, as well as a certain pulp luridness and fantasy, that the later Chandler novels pretty much wring out. The result is a genre which is fitted perfectly to a new kind of "detective story", even though it can easily transcend this medium.
Chandler and Ross MacDonald are cool because they actually write a lot about what noir is. My thoughts on this subject are obviously heavily inspired by theirs.
At Orycon the weekend before last, there was a panel on noir SF. The panel's charter distinguished between tech noir (presumably cyberpunk, which is unquestionably a noir genre) and "future noir". Reportedly, the panelists had a hard time with all this; while respected writers and editors, they didn't really feel like they knew much about noir. I wish I'd been there—I have strong opinions on this topic.
My friend who was telling me this story reported that there was a particular concern about what constituted "future noir SF". I thought for a moment, and suggested David Brin's recent and terrific throwback novel Kiln People. "That novel was mentioned in the panel instructions!" said my friend. "But what makes it noir?"
(For the record, here is the panel description:Children of Bladerunner—Tech and Future Noir
Panel discussion on the background and influence of Noir film and fiction on Science Fiction and the development of the sub-genres of Tech Noir and Future Noir, represented by films such as Bladerunner, The Matrix, Minority Report and stories such as Altered Carbon, The Whole Wide World, Kiln People, and the works of Philip K Dick [how can you forget him?!])
One strong clue that something is true noir is that it is written in the first person. It is possible to write third-person noir—Hammett did it. But there is no more protagonist-centered story than a noir story, and first-person means easy exploration of the observations, actions, and most importantly inner state of the hero. One of the clever beauties of Kiln People is that it plays an extremely cute game with this noir convention—writing an intensely personal account from the first-person of many variations of its hero. One can almost hear Brin, who is certainly not shy of messing with a genre, exclaiming "Oh yeah? well watch this!"
Another clue to noir is that the protagonist is a romantic hero; a powerful, incorruptible man in a corrupt world. Noir asks us to identify with the best part of ourselves—the part that is capable of great things, and uses that power for good. The noir hero is a usually knight, fighting the fights of others—perhaps for hire, perhaps for personal reasons.
As such, the noir hero faces the knight's dilemma. Since the time of the Arthurian legends, the question has always been "which causes are the good ones, and worth fighting for?" The noir hero's journey is most often one of discovery of hidden truths, and these truths often change the hero's and the reader's view of who "the good guys" are. By the conclusion, the deepest underlying truth will be revealed, and it will rarely be pretty. The hero's power will set things as right as an imperfect world allows, and the reader will be left with the catharsis of that victory.