hotels with a neon sign blinking through the window

Film noir is...

(1) A French term meaning "black film," or film of the night, inspired by the Series Noir, a line of cheap paperbacks that translated hard-boiled American crime authors and found a popular audience in France.
(2) A movie which at no times misleads you into thinking there is going to be a happy ending.
(3) Locations that reek of the night, of shadows, of alleys, of the back doors of fancy places, of apartment buildings with a high turnover rate, of taxi drivers and bartenders who have seen it all.
(4) Cigarettes. Everybody in film noir is always smoking, as if to say, "On top if everything else, I'e been assigned to get through three packs today." The best smoking movie of all time is Out of the Past, in which Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas smoke furiously at each other. At one point Mitchum enters a room, Douglas extends a pack and says, "Cigarette?" and Mitchum, holding up his hand, says, "Smoking."
(5) Women who would just as soon kill you as love you, and vice versa.
(6) For women: low necklines, floppy hats, mascara, lipstick, dressing rooms, boudoirs, calling the doorman by his first name, high heels, red dresses, elbow-length gloves, mixing drinks, having gangsters as boyfriends, having soft spots for alcoholic private eyes, wanting a lot of someone else's women, sprawling dead on the floor with every limb meticulously arranged and every hair in place.
(7) For men: fedoras, suits and ties, shabby residential hotels with a neon sign blinking through the window, buying yourself a drink out of the office bottle, cars with running boards, all-night diners, protecting kids who shouldn't be playing with the big guys, being on first-name terms with homicide cops, knowing a lot of people whose descriptions end in ies, such as bookies, newsies, junkies, alkies, jockeys, and cabbies.
(8) Movies either shot in black and white or feeling like they were.
(9) Relationships in which love is the only final flop card in the poker game of death.
(10) The most American film genre, because no society could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear, and betrayal, unless it were essentially naive and optimistic.

- Roger Ebert, "A Guide to Film Noir Genre"

The World of the Story

These stories [detective stories] develop a growing sense of discrepancy, of something wrong which may lead to something worse. In most pure detective stories, the very worst is averted through the efforts of the principal character, and evil is quelled and punished. But in stories of suspense the worst often occurs, and its fearful truth lights up the world of the story like nocturnal lightning.

...

[The crime genre] is a free form of popular art, and like any other popular art it exists to be enjoyed. Its value lies first in its style and strength as a story, then in its revelation of the shapes and meanings of life in all their subtlety and surprise.

...

A strong popular convention like that of the suspense story is both an artistic and a social heritage. It keeps the forms of the art alive for the writer to use. It trains his readers, endowing both writer and reader with a common vocabulary of structural shapes and narrative possibilities. It becomes a part of the language in which we think and feel, reaching our whole society and helping to hold our civilization together.

- a few thoughts on the crime genre from Ross Macdonald, from his introduction to Great Stories of Suspense, 1974.

On psychopathology -

"Only when the concrete details of environment are laid in, as, for instance, in an honest and discerning novel, can the significance of behavior be well appreciated. Certainly no brief case summary and probably no orthodox psychiatric history can succeed in portraying the character and the behavior of [psychopaths] as they appear day after day and year after year in actual life.
    
It is not enough to set down that a certain patient stole his brother's watch or that another got drunk in a poolroom while his incipient bride waited at the altar. To get the feel of the person whose behavior shows disorder, it is necessary to feel something of his surroundings. ... It is all but impossible to demonstrate any of the fundamental symptoms in the psychopath [in the hospital alone]. The substance of the problem, real as it is in life, disappears, or at least escapes our specialized means of perception, when the patient is removed from the milieu in which he is to function."

- Hervey Cleckly, The Mask of Sanity, 1941.

The streets were dark with something more than night.

"Looking back on his stories in 1950 he identified their main characteristic as the 'smell of fear' they managed to generate. In this, they echoed his own experience, for they were about 'a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night. The mystery story grew hard and cynical about motive and characters, but it was not cynical about the effects it tried to produce nor about its technique of producing them.' "

- The Life of Raymond Chandler, Frank MacShane

As Close As Mars Is To Saturn

"I read all three of the morning papers over my eggs and bacon the next morning. Their accounts of the affair came as close to the truth as newspaper stories usually come - as close as Mars is to Saturn. None of them connected Owen Taylor, driver of the Lido Pier Suicide Car, with the Laurel Canyon Exotic Bungalow Slaying. ... It was a nice write-up. It gave the impression that Geiger had been killed the night before, that Brody had been killed about an hour later, and that Captain Cronjager had solved both murders while lighting a cigarette. The suicide of Taylor made Page One of Section II. There was a photo of the sedan on the deck of the power lighter, with the license plate blacked out, and something covered with a cloth lying on the deck beside the running board. Owen Taylor had been despondent and in poor health. His family lived in Dubuque, and his body would be shipped there. There would be no inquest."

- from The Big Sleep, 1939