‘The walk of a dead man.’ Will dark hour stories eventually come to Chico? 

By Scott Thomas Anderson

“I couldn’t hear my own footsteps. It was the walk of a dead man.”

– ‘Double Indemnity’

Robert Strom, Chico’s ‘Detective of Film Noir,’ is an author, playwright and film expert whose historic writing has made French nwaʁ –or tales of the night – relevant to the City of Roses. Yet in the realm of fiction, Chico still hasn’t experienced its Art Deco towers, Neo-classic flourishes and Jazz Age marquees being channel into great Noir settings after sundown.

But as evidenced by what just happened 90 miles south, it’s possible that could eventually change.   

For many, the term ‘Noir’ conjures images of black-and-white cinematic who-done-its like “The Thin Man,” “The Man Who Knew Too Much” and even “Casablanca.” Those aren’t technically noirs, even if they offer a similar escape chute through time.

To my thinking, Noir begins with writer-director Billy Wilder. Specifically, it starts when he teamed up with Raymond Chandler, the poetic literary overlord of crime pulps, as the two of them adapted “Double Indemnity” for the screen. That novel was penned by a different best-selling suspense writer, James M. Cain. The public was titillated by what Cain had done in “Double Indemnity,” as well as another lurid page-turner he hammered out called “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” Both books, which could best be described as tense, high-brow trash with artistic edges, are about men going to homicidal lengths to bed married women they hardly know.

Chandler wasn’t too impressed with Cain’s writing. In one of his letters, he described Cain as a dirty-minded schoolboy with a piece of chalk, a chalkboard, and no one looking.

Nevertheless, the script that Chandler and Wilder produced from Cain’s ideas was pure brilliance; and the aesthetic of what Wilder ultimately put on the screen created what we now call Film Noir.

It is the imagistic embodiment of loneliness, lust and failure.

It’s the presentation that shadows of the night reflect shadows on the soul.

Following “Double Indemnity,” the genre gained strength with Jacques Tourneur’s “Out of the Past,” Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious,” Howard Hawks’ “The Big Sleep,” Orson Wells’ “A Touch of Evil” and Billy Wilder’s other stellar contribution, “Sunset Boulevard.”

As the visuals and music of those films kept getting cast over books written by Los Angeles-based novelists, American crime literature began soaking in Film Noir’s sensibilities, pulling them back onto the written page in gradual evolutions. From there, some hard-boiled detective stories transmogrified into Literary Noir.

And that style of writing has only strengthened and spread. In fact, it’s everywhere in contemporary crime fiction. The Belfast novelist Adrian McKinty, who I once interviewed at his hometown bookstore No Alibis, has been called the spearhead of North Irish Noir. The Scottish wordsmith Ian Rankin, who I was also lucky enough to interviewed for News & Review, has been hailed the pint-drinking progenitor of Tartan Noir. And, of course, the late Stieg Larsson’s Swedish thriller “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is viewed as a groundbreaker for the cold tones of Nordic Noir. 

But I’ve noticed that the Noir touch can dusted itself onto nonfiction writing too – without the author necessarily knowing it. I’ve always thought a 2019 feature for CN&R’s sister publication titled “When the psychic pirate met the social media detective” had distinctly Noir themes and flavors, or maybe those of Tech Noir, though I’m sure author Raheem Hosseini wasn’t conscious of that as he punched up this tale of a strange stabbing.

A few months ago, I wrote and published an essay on Medium called “Tempest on the Desert,” which was about how the breakup of my last relationship was tied to a whiskey summit in Las Vegas and impromptu drinks at a former mob hangout. I thought that I was scribbling a raw confessional, but one of the first things I heard from a reader was “There is something so Noir about it.”

You just never know when this genre will creep in.

On a recent night walk in the state capital’s hardest neighborhood, I found myself imagining how the mid-century Noir man David Goodis might narrate the street-scape I was venturing through. Maybe something like, One of those heavy nights when no one’s home but the drug-totes and tweak-swingers and hushed alcoholics with urban ghosts in their eyes.

Noir’s a kind lyricism of the damned.

The Bookstore in Chico offers chances to dig into Literary Noir. Its mystery section currently has Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon,” as well as Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely” and – my personal favorite – “The Long Goodbye.” It also has an array of titles by the hard-drinking Patricia Highsmith. At the moment, The Bookstore’s DVD section is selling “Red House,” a haunting noir film starring Edward G. Robinson, Judith Anderson and Rory Calhoun. It just so happens that Rory Calhoun was imprisoned as a teen-convict at Preston Castle in Ione, near where I grew up. Those kind of life histories embedded in the Noir legacy are what Chico’s Robert Strom specializes in uncovering. He recently penned a nonfiction book called “Cries in the Night: Children in Film Noir.” That tome includes information on child actor Dee Pollock, who starred in the Noir classic “Beware My Lovely,” and then went on to live in Chico for years as an adult.   

So, Strom has given Chico its nonfiction book bon fides around Noir. But what about fiction?  

For nearly 20 years, the publishing house Akashic Books has been creating a popular Noir anthology series that highlights different cities. They started with short stories anchored in some of the most Noir-ish places ever, releasing “Los Angeles Noir,” “San Francisco Noir,” “Manhattan Noir” and “New Orleans Noir.” Each collection features a stable of high-performing writers from those respective cities. Then, the publisher branched out internationally with titles about Noir in Paris, Rome, Venice, Marseille and Barcelona. Having been to those cities, I agree they hold the kind of shadowed pathways to romance and death that are essential to the genre.

Akashic has since continued on with more American locales, wrangling an array of impressive wordsmiths for Noir projects about Austin, Portland, Phoenix, Boston, Honolulu and other places.

But in all that time, the capital city of the largest state in the Union – a river and Delta city – hadn’t gotten its turn at the bat.

That is, until this week, when Akashic officially released a collection intriguing tales called “Sacramento Noir.” News & Review just published a true crime and literary feature on why that book is historically and thematically justified.

Now, the question becomes, “Will there ever be a ‘Chico Noir’ hitting stands?” Beyond Sacramento and the genre’s fog-cradle of San Francisco, the publisher has also put together anthologies set in Oakland and Berkeley. Hopefully, it will continue to explore stories of the night playing out in Northern California. If so, the North State, with its weathered theaters and arson-scorched mansions and Bohemian survivors and militia wanna-bes could offer plenty of narrative possibilities. But even if Akashic doesn’t end up having interest, there’s nothing to prevent Butte County’s many professional writers from playing with the style on their own. And whichever scenario comes to pass, the City of Roses if the perfect place to start.  

Scott Thomas Anderson is also the writer and producer of the true crime documentary podcast series “Trace of the Devastation.”