In Denis Johnson’s epochal 1992 story collection Jesus’ Son, the eponymous narrator, Fuckhead, observes a drought-ridden Iowa landscape while transporting two acquaintances, one previously murdered by the other: “The failed, wilted cornstalks were laid on the ground like rows of underthings. Most of the farmers didn’t even plant anymore. All the false visions had been erased. It felt like the moment before the Savior comes. And the Savior did come, but we had to wait a long time.” Johnson’s ridiculous, doomed characters (who elsewhere loiter on el trains, in dreamlike hotels, and in bars scheduled for wrecking balls) are constantly subordinated to the torments of the landscape. Noir may well be the redheaded stepchild of serious contemporary writing, but as noir-influenced writers like Johnson demonstrate, it remains very much in the American grain.
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Certain novels of this period capture the back-alley roughs of Chicago with a telegraphic immediacy still accessible today. Little Caesar (1929) by W.R. Burnett remains a tough and picaresque (albeit cartoonishly defamatory) examination of gangster realities, preserving a view of ethnic enclaves that later disappeared beneath expressways and universities–public works projects intended to eradicate the realities of an entrenched underground economy documented both here and in other early noir, such as Whitfield’s Green Ice (1930). (According to scholar William Marling, the 28-year-old Burnett worked “as a night-clerk in a seedy hotel” while writing his debut, thus anticipating the countless youthful scribes who’ve toiled in Chicago’s mammoth service industry ever since.)
Jonathan Latimer’s novels, such as The Lady in the Morgue (1936), recall 1930s Chicago as a sweltering town of smutty, inebriated violence. Latimer later claimed to be parodying the genre conventions enforced by the commercial popularity of Hammett’s Sam Spade novels, yet his books’ snarky humor and the foibles of his shambling protagonist (“Detective Crane–Unique and Alcoholic,” one tag line boasted) surely presage the alienated noir heroes of Willeford, Ellroy, and Barry Gifford among many others. It’s been conjectured that Latimer’s fondness for gin-soaked drollery and reliance on DT-addled reporters as Crane’s foils derived from his early-30s stint in the newsroom of the old Herald-Examiner.
Similarly, John Wessel’s This Far, No Further (1996)–set in a wintry Hyde Park–applies hoary gumshoe formulas to a juicily original and unabashedly romantic take on ancient Chicago rituals. Wessel grasped the noir purity inherent in a city of clashing classes and hostile neighborhoods.
Perhaps what’s most surprising about The Walkaway is how much mileage Phillips gains from Gunther’s semicomic wanderings. One woman who knew Gunther in his prime considers him “the toughest bastard she’d ever met,” while Sidney reminds the incompetent nursing home manager that “he just doesn’t know what fucking year it is, is all.” Gunther’s senility is represented as a quasi-narcotic haze–returning to his old town, he fakes his way through meetings with people he barely remembers, believing these dead relationships to be the key to retrieving his money–and it serves as a surprisingly efficient metaphor for the noir condition. The oldsters’ unease with their own checkered pasts (the war years, which transformed everything, and the curdled aftermath of the 1950s) reflects upon the penny-ante schemes their juniors are currently perpetrating. A rather large number of eccentric, aggrieved characters are running about, but Phillips eventually clarifies how most of them are tied to the missing money and to the violence of 1952. Suggesting a secret fidelity to covert noir principles, even the most minor characters resonate with barely concealed hurts.
