Bearded Noir?

Mes Amis

Is Stuart MacBride noir?

Its a question I promised to answer. Its a question I should have answered. But I got sidetracked. After all, being a very busy badger sometimes things get in the way.

But we're back to answer the question.

The answer is no.

And that's not to say that ol' MacBeard isn't dark. He has horrible things happen to his characters. People get punished physically. Terrible people commit terrible crimes. But its not noir.

Because what is lacking is the spectre of death. What is lacking is a certain tone.

And that's the trouble with defining noir; more often that not its down to a feeling; a general, overall impression of death rather than any death in and of itself. After all if death was all it really took then Midsummer Murders would be noir as hell (after all, an entire village of murderers is pretty damn bleak).

MacBride's debut, Cold Granite, is hardly a walk in the park. I mean, there are peadophiles, hard bastard gangsters and even worse there are Aberdonians*. There is a spectre of violence. There is a palpable sense of death. And yet it is not pervading. You know that the good guys will out - even in a bittersweet fashion - by the end of the book. MacBride's world is ordered. Evil is punished, even if good is sometimes sacrificed in order to achieve this end. There is a palpable tragedy, of course, but it is not a noir tragedy. It shows that MacBride's world is often an unfair place but it does not mean that it is irredeemable.

Noir is about the sense that the world is screwed. The world is irredeemably messed up. This does not mean that every character iser a glue sniffing, badger-fucking asshole who never connected with his mother and has a terrible, life-destroying addiction to eating Pop Tarts off the stomach of large breasted, wrinkly-faced Fintry** Prostitutes. Rather its about the fact that characters can strive and hope and wish and never quite get what they want. The world plays tricks on our characters, blinds them, screws with them so completely that we have to wonder what it was that gave them hope in the first place. Not to say that there is no hope, but rather that the hope is such a distant, alien thing that it may as well be some hallucination on the part of the character.

So what is MacBeard, then? Is he hardboiled, perhaps? He could well be. But even then I'm not sure. One thing is certain. He is not the "murder equivalent of chick lit" (to quote the man himself). He's a damn fine crime writer. But he's not noir.

Not that he needs to be, either. While I love my noir, its not the be all and end all of crime fiction. One of my frequent defences of crime is that "it can do everything that literature can do, but because its all about conflict - in the most tense of fashions - it often manages to do so in a far more entertaining fashion"***. Worrying about whether something is noir or cosy or a thriller or even whether it qualifies as a crime novel isn't the point. The point isn't whether its a good novel.

And while its not noir, Cold Granite is a good novel.

Au revoir

Russel

*I'm sorry, but it was too obvious a dig to miss - Aberdonians are lovely people. Fit, like. And so forth.

**Nothing against people from Fintry either. But I had to choose somewhere.

***Or words to that effect.