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According to Paul Schrader, film noir emerges because audiences desired greater realism in their films. An increasing number of postwar moviegoers considered films depicting “the seamy side of things” to be a more accurate representation of their experience of the United States. A similar movement occurs in detective fiction with the shift from Golden Age mystery writers, like Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Ellery Queen, to the hard-boiled tradition. Raymond Chandler describes this development in his essay, “The Simple Art of Murder.” According to Chandler, a significant segment of mystery readers were dissatisfied with Golden Age detective stories and wanted more realistic crime fiction. These readers “were not afraid of the seamy side of things: they lived there” (Chandler, “Art of Murder” 989).
The original consumers of American noir read their tough-guy detective fiction in pulp magazines like Black Mask, where Hammett and Chandler published their early stories. Dumenil explains that pulp writers identified with their readers and saw themselves “as workmen who produced piecemeal prose for people like themselves” (31). Chandler credits Dashiell Hammett with starting the realistic hard-boiled tradition because Hammett “took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley” (“Art of Murder” 989). In other words, “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish (Chandler, “Art of Murder” 989). Furthermore, Hammett did not write in the elevated prose of the Victorian era, but in “the American language,” the speech of “common men” (Chandler, “Art of Murder” 989).
American noir was the creation of writers who toiled at their labor, assembling stories for as little as one penny per word. Pulp writers were about the business of creating fiction that would appeal to the genre’s mostly working-class readers. Out of this initially modest ambition, they created the noir world. Hammett and Chandler did not create, but refined, the hard-boiled detective, whose existential approach enables him to survive in the doomed world he must negotiate to earn his meager living. His world, life, and philosophy represent the essential themes of existentialism for the common man.