Author: jacobmoniz

When considering the idea of “Black noir” prior to this course, my thinking was fairly straightforward: detective fiction, probably hokey, written by Black authors or featuring Black protagonists. That’s not to dismiss the genre or the content of the novels I expected to read; I just didn’t think there was much more to it.

Instead, we confronted the complex, fraught realities of race in the United States through the lens of an evolving, evocative genre of writing most prevalent through the twentieth century. Noir itself presented itself as more layered and complicated than I’d previously been led to believe. In addition to the cheesy detective story with its overwrought narrative and sharply lit femme fatale, we defined noir based on its confrontation of the harsher realities present in our world, stories highlighting established systems of power and their potential for corruption and incompetence; criminal underworlds; moral ambiguities; self-autonomy; gender and its relation to power; queerness; and central to this course, race.

Throughout this course, we’ve examined the evolution of noir. From a white man’s perspective, one in which the masculine exerts dominance of women, foreigners, and those coded as queer. This view of the world undeniably informed the character of the noir genre; however, as we continued onward, we were introduced to Black male protagonists, reflecting various experiences in the eastern, western, southern, and northern/midwestern United States. We saw these men in large, urban settings, as well as smaller, rural areas. They came from money, or were working class, or earned a living as criminals. In most cases, these men rejected established authority figures and systems of power; they were wrongfully accused by racist police officers, or simply abandoned by systems meant to protect and care for all people without prejudice. Through the critical lens of noir, we saw that failed to be the case on more than one occasion.

At times, there was a frustration in reading the perspective of sexist, prejudiced, at times violent men with any sympathy; their anxieties and frustrations regarding poor and unfair treatment due to their race was valid, yet the genre sometimes felt too steeped in the toxic perspectives and behaviors of the white men who popularized it. As we came to see in Street Players by Kinohi Nishikawa, “Black Sleaze” as a genre of pulp/noir fiction represents noir with a mass market appeal that enticed white readers for its voyeuristic appeal and Black readers with no clear agency in determining which books would be published and made available to their communities. Here, the idea of black noir became complicated: with texts like Trick Baby, do we celebrate a sense of unflinching authenticity in its blunt examination of sex, crime, and violence, or do we recognize the predatory publishing practices that relied on sensationalism at the expense of other Black voices? The issue is still one I’ve yet to come to a clear conclusion on.

What most excites me at the end of this course is the ways in which we’ve seen noir grow. We read noir with a female protagonist, one who didn’t rely on sexism or gratuitous violence to survive, but recognized the complex racial dynamics at play in her world. We have writing that looks back on the past and its more problematic practices with scrutiny, injecting noir with modern sensibilities without abandoning what makes it so compelling: its ability to venture into areas of life most people would rather turn away from. As noir develops further, I’d hope to hear an even greater diversity of voices. For Black noir, it would be interesting to hear from more queer voices within the community. Given the reality of violence against Black members of the LGBTQ+ community, it feels like a large oversight. Given what we’ve learned about publishing, I suspect that’s intentional.

In the article “Noir by Noirs: Towards a New Realism in Black Cinema,” Manthia Diawara introduces the idea of “noir by noirs” as “the redeployment of noir style by Black filmmakers [that] redeems Blackness from the genre by recasting the relation between light and dark on the screen as a metaphor for making Black people and their cultures visible” (526-527). Chester Himes and his literary works are cited as examples of noir by noir narratives influential for the ways in which they took the conventions of early American noir (dominated by stylized contrasts of light versus dark put forth by white authors) and recontextualized them to portray the realities of Black American life. Himes’ practice of subverting the expected relationship between light and dark/moral and immoral in his writing informed black filmmakers also working in the noir genre to take those same conventions and subvert in their own medium. “In a broader sense,” Diawara writes, “Black film noir shines light (as in daylight) on Black people” (527).

Diawara’s article was published in 1993, placing it in-between the publication of Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress in 1990 and its film adaptation starring Denzel Washington in 1995. Referencing films contemporary to the article, Diawara observes that “[t]he characters accumulate through the transformation of the consciousness of Blacks caring for Blacks, the resistance to colonizing structures, and the move toward a good-life society which is based on material conditions” (536). This shift in the telling of Black stories is attributed to the agency of writers and filmmakers working to maintain a sense of fidelity using Black realism within the genre of film noir. Given the period in which Diawara is writing, his analysis is aptly applied to Mosley’s approach to the genre while writing Devil in a Blue Dress.

The character changes identified by Diawara (Blacks caring for Blacks, a resistance to colonizing structures, and a move toward a good-life society) are based on character transformations in a number of films from the 90s: “Deep Cover, Do the Right Thing, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, Boyz N the Hood, and Juice” (536). At this point, Black filmmakers were promoting stories of emancipation and power within Black communities, often operating against the established narrative patterns and norms established within the genres they were operating within (obviously, film noir being the main focus of Diawara’s analysis). This approach to character, however, extends into the literature being written in the 90s, as evidenced by Mosley’s writing.

In Devil in a Blue Dress, Black characters to caring for one another is consistently seen. After losing his job with Champion for refusing his white boss’s demand to work extended hours, Easy is in danger of losing his home, as he can’t afford the mortgage payments. Joppy, for better or for worse, then sets Easy up with DeWitt Albright to help him make a quick buck and keep his house. Later, Easy visits John’s Place, an illegal speakeasy which immediately presents itself as fundamentally ingrained within Easy’s Houston-Los Angeles network and community. The woman working the front and her nephew, the bouncer, are friendly and familiar with Easy, offering him sincere advice and information with his safety in mind. Though this treatment is extended to Easy rather than enacted by Easy himself, his perspective on these events signify a shared ideology with each of these characters and their actions.

John’s Place then serves to represent a resistance to colonizing structures. Even though Prohibition has ended by the events of the novel, John continues to operate it illegally, as there is no question of the city government’s prejudice towards John and his business operations; the fact that his business is now legal makes no difference to those in positions of power. Easy’s assertion that he might meet the sheriff with a rifle if they attempted to evict him from his home also represents an abjection towards authority and the revocation of land Easy feels rightfully entitled to owning.

Easy’s house then also represents a move toward a good-life society based on material conditions. Home ownership is important to Easy, as it gives him something that is undoubtedly his, property that makes him as successful and in many ways equal to white landowners in the United States. It represents an emancipation from renting and being beholden to the whims of a landlord. To own land is to exert a right previously denied to Black people throughout the United States. For Easy, home ownership “constitutes a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood, from chaos to organization, from powerlessness to empowerment” (Diawara, 536).

After Mumsfield confirms to Blanche that Aunt Emmeline has been replaced and presumably killed, Blanche’s first course of action is to make a phone call to Archibald, the lawyer who witnessed and accepted the falsified signing of the will. “He had some stake in this, too. Her only other choice was to call the police. The idea of voluntarily putting herself in the hands of the sheriff’s office didn’t warrant a moment’s thought. She went to the phone and dialed” (179). In my initial reading of this passage, I allowed myself to forget the narrator’s previous focus on Archibald and expected the next paragraph to lead into Blanche’s phone call with the police, as if her self-sacrifice was her “only choice,” a moral act that “didn’t warrant a moment’s thought.”

When thinking of Blanche on the Lam as a work of noir fiction, it’s useful to remember that this is a story about subverting figures within established systems of power. Like the protagonists of other novels that we’ve read throughout the semester, Blanche as a noir heroine is tasked with seeking justice outside the boundaries of the established legal system. 

Blanche, as the title so plainly communicates, is on the lam from law enforcement after being sentenced to 30 days in prison for writing bad checks. From the very first page of the novel, the American legal system is challenged by Neely and our protagonist for its adoption of legal equality over equity; Blanche’s difficult circumstances aren’t taken into account during her sentencing. Beyond questions of equality and equity, Neely goes a step further, introducing race, class, and power into the story when Blanche makes her escape. Sitting on the toilet after her sentencing, Blanche fumes over her employers and the carelessness with which they wielded their power over her livelihood, the:

 …so-called genteel Southern white women for whom she currently did day work… she’d intended no crime. If four of her employers hadn’t gone out of town without paying her, she’d have had enough money in the bank to cover the checks (3-4). 

Soon after, the matron accompanying Blanche to the court’s restroom is distracted by the commotion caused by a county commissioner accused of taking bribes. “She was positive he wouldn’t get thirty days. A little bad publicity, and a lot of sympathy from people who might easily be in his position, was about all he’d get” (4-5). Here, a man in an appointed political position is accused of a white-collar crime with effects more far-reaching than Blanche’s bad checks; however, based on the assessment given by our narrator, he will face less severe punishment than Blanche punishment due to his higher, more powerful position in society. Though his race isn’t explicitly stated, “people who might easily be in his position” suggests other politicians or people with power, which in 1990s rural North Carolina probably means white.

Being that this is a noir text, Blanche must seek avenues towards justice that skirt around the restrictive and at times corrupt boundaries of the law. By the time she calls Archibald, the sheriff has already been revealed as having involved himself in Grace and Everett’s crimes. So, using her quick wits and knowledge of the corrupt figures around her, Blanche identifies a way in which she can manipulate/pressure Archibald into helping her help Mumsfield in a way that helps himself.

However, we must not forget: Blanche is a Black noir heroine. Where Sam Spade might cockily use law enforcement as a pool of bumbling, but useful tools, Blanche knows to be wary of white men in positions of power. “Now she could only wait. It was a hard prescription. Waiting for some prime-aged white man to show up and set things right had the ring of guaranteed failure” (180).

 In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Tradition, Toni Morrison recontextualizes the American literary tradition by addressing the “Africanist” presence inherent in all American writing. That is to say: it is impossible for an American author or an American story to embody the idea or sense of American-ism without gesturing or referring directly to the influence of Black communities, their people, and their experiences.

Over the course of this class, that perspective has been applied to various works under the umbrella of the noir genre. As early as The Maltese Falcon, one may point to the novel’s treatment of the “other” or the “foreigner” as parallel to and undeniably influenced by the treatment of white Americans towards Black Americans. Even characters identified as white or as coming from a specific place of origin would still exist within the realm of the other, a realm understood only through the paradigm of the novel’s white author. In a sense, every character but the noir anti-hero is Black, in the sense that they are othered and treated as less human than the protagonist himself.

However, Morrison’s reappraisal of the American literary tradition goes deeper, as her aim is not to merely generalize as non-white, non-male characters as equal. Her analysis is specific to the “Africanist,” Black presence. As our course has progressed, we’ve witnessed the progression of that presence: from Black secondary characters written by white authors, to Black protagonists written by white authors, to Black protagonists written by Black authors, and so on. Rather than hinting or unintentionally engaging with the presence of Blackness in their subject matter, we’ve moved towards literature that directly confronts, embraces, and bares for all the world to see the highs, the lows, the complexities, and the simple realities of the Black, American experience.

Given our class discussion identifying a perceived difficulty or a lack of engagement with our recent books, I’ve tried to understand our collective response to Never Die Alone using Morrison’s thinking as a magnifying lens. She says in her first part of the collection:

My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world. To think about (and wrestle with) the full implications of my situation leads me to consider what happens when other writers work in a highly and historically racialized society. For them, as for me, imagining is not merely looking or looking at; nor is it taking oneself intact into the other. It is, for the purposes of the work, becoming (4).

I interpret this in several ways, some of which may be taking liberties. However, when applied to Never Die Alone, I can’t help but wonder at Donald Goines’s personal experience writing the text and the ways in which he as the writer needed to become his novel; or rather, the novel became him. Like Iceberg Slim and Trick Baby, Donald Goines’s Never Die Alone draws heavily from his own personal history. What distinguishes Goines’s work from Slim’s is the extent to which each author’s novel becomes representative of the author. Slim writes a character supposedly based directly on himself. Goines, however, writes several characters who aren’t explicitly stated to be the author, yet connect to his highs, lows, complexities, and hard experiences in a way that’s multifaceted and impossible to avoid/ignore as a reader.

I’d say that, beyond our individual issues with ideology or morality in the recent texts we’ve read, our class’s difficulty in reading these texts may be due to a level of discomfort inherent in the aspect of becoming. Having been raised in a society where Blackness is both blatantly and unconsciously pushed to the margins, reading these texts may be the first time that many of us have been tasked with intimately reading a text so tied to the author’s experience as Black in America.

Again, there are several ways to apply Morrison’s thinking to our class and Never Die Alone in particular. However, I think reevaluating whether or not our earlier discussions were truly more fruitful is worth some attention. Did we truly unpack and engage with the inexplicit presence of Blackness in otherwise “white” texts? Or did we discuss only what was comfortable until confronted with texts like Trick Baby and Never Die Alone? 

       In chapter three of Street Players by Kinohi Nishikawa, the genre of “Black Sleaze” is introduced as a genre of popular pulp fiction in the 1960s: fiction with a mass market appeal, enticing white readers for its voyeuristic appeal and Black readers with fewer books to choose from. It’s this perspective on the publication and popularization of Black Sleaze that I found of particular interest this week; the motivation for publishing some texts over others due to various concerns (financial, cultural, and political), which in turn has the power to shape popular culture.

       On page 76, Nishikawa quotes New York Times Book Review writer Mike Watkins, who in 1968 explored a growing divide in taste among older and younger Black readers in New York City’s “‘Black ghettos.'” Nishikawa quotes Watkins and unpacks his analysis on the cause behind this trend, noting “‘a lack of book outlets within the ghetto which provide a wide variety of titles’ to readers. It was, then, a matter of class, geography, and tacitly racist distribution practices.” Nishikawa goes on to explain then that “Black readers seemed to lurch between extremes – radical literature to trash fiction – only because that is what distributors (and the publishers that used their services) sent to their communities” (76).

       What I find so interesting is the power that publishers and distributors have in shaping the popular image and understanding of an entire group of people/way of life; specifically, the Black community living in urban spaces. Trick Baby, for all its inventiveness and authority as a piece of creative nonfiction, seems still to have been published for spectacle and profit, rather than the lifting Black voices, which is the narrative once forwarded by the Holloway House themselves.

       In the publishing world of 2022, I wonder how much progress has been made in presenting a diversity of voices and experiences, regardless of mainstream appeal and profit. Now more than ever, independent presses (and filmmakers, for that matter) have resources at their disposal to produce media that goes against the standard practices of larger, more profit-conscious publishers and studios. However, debates on artistic merit and value continue to plague certain works seen as depicting particular identities and groups in a negative or morally ambiguous light. For example, Luster by Raven Lelani. The novel follows a young Black woman living on New York and unapologetically depicts her casual approach to sex and alternative relationships. While seeing the value in Lelani’s prose and social commentary, some have questioned the aims of her publisher and the nature of publishing such a novel over others. Alternatively, some of the harsher criticism to the work can be traced to racism and a strict adherence to white, Christian morality. Considering Nishikawa and the nature of publishing in 1968 may provide insight into publishing practices today.

As I’ve read through Iceberg Slim’s Trick Baby, I’ve picked up on the ways in which Slim relies on the rhythms, patterns, and linguistics of the oral storytelling tradition to write his novel in a way unlike the mainstream, literary norm.

The most obvious element of this lies in Slim’s use of slang and everyday language. White Folks, our protagonist and narrator, is a white-passing black man working “the con” in the southside of 1960s Chicago. Without disrupting or slowing the narrative to define terms or thoroughly contextualize them, Slim allows White Folks to speak with a vocabulary natural to the character, flowing in such a way that the narrative moves with conversational ease. Words like flue, fluff, and the phrase Trick Baby itself are presented as commonplace words because, to this narrator, they are.

The framing device of a story within a story firmly established the novel in the oral tradition. In the prologue, Iceberg Slim himself is presented as a character serving time in prison. His new cellmate, White Folks, arrives one day and the two strike up a bond. Five days before Folks’s release, he decides to tell Slim his life story, which launches us into the narrative. So, within the world of the story itself, this story is one being told orally. The reader is then primed to approach the text with this in mind.

Pacing and the structure of the writing also lend itself to elements of the oral tradition. Characters speak expositionally, with what reads as monologues taking up pages. This style is reminiscent of a speaker taking on the voice of another, providing necessary backstory and information in a way that isn’t necessarily rooted in realistic dialogue, but efficient oral storytelling.

But what does this mean for noir? It feels unflinchingly honest, which is somewhat contradictory, given in its reliance on a storytelling form that allows for embellishment. It captures a sense of fidelity that might otherwise be missing or appear in a different form within the more straightforward, “literary” texts we’ve read previously.

In his essay “The Whiteness of Film Noir,” Eric Lott investigates the way in which film noir “constantly though obliquely invoked the racial dimension” of the figural, moral tension of light against dark (543). Racial exoticism and primitivism, cosmetic masquerade, literal and figural border crossing, verbal and visual coding, and endless examples of characters portrayed as the “other” contribute to works in which race is not blatantly explored or engaged with, yet relied upon to inform moral, ideological, or simply cultural aspects of the world within film noir.

In The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes, a medical intern named Hugh travels from California to Arizona to attend his niece’s wedding. On the way there, he encounters a pregnant, teenage hitchhiker named Iris who later turns up dead. Hugh’s connection to Iris, however brief, raises questions in the police regarding his possible involvement in her death.

In reading The Expendable Man, it becomes apparent that Hugh’s interaction with Iris, even prior to her death, has inspired feelings of anxiety and paranoia. When first stopping to check on Iris: “A chill sense of apprehension came on him and he wished to hell he hadn’t stopped” (5). As they drive, he is suspicious of her answers to his questions and refuses to stop anywhere but the bus depot, fearful that someone might see them together. Later, at the border crossing from California to Arizona, Hugh has an uncomfortable interaction with overly suspicious border agents. Iris is waiting for him and manipulates Hugh into giving her another ride. “There was absolutely nothing Hugh could do to escape her. To refuse would have been worse than to accede” (20).

Hugh’s anxiety and paranoia surrounding Iris and various law enforcement officials could be read as an older man uncomfortable with the optics of driving alone with a teenage girl. Combined with the visual cues to their respective class standings offered by Hughes (Hugh’s cadillac, Iris’s cheap dye job, etc.) one could be forgiven for interpreting Hugh’s anxiety and paranoia for feelings based on class and gender disparity.

However, though never explicitly stated, Hugh is a Black man. This is defined in contrast to Iris’s clear description as a white girl. Understanding this “constantly though obliquely invoked” racial dimension of the text creates a new layer of understanding in the reader. Instead of simply being a story about a well-off man encountering a poor young girl, we are exposed to the biases, tensions, and dangers that arise when a Black man becomes involved with the sordid, tragic circumstances surrounding a young, murdered, white girl.
Hughes’s approach to race differs wildly from Chester Himes’s exploration of the matter in If He Hollers Let Him Go. This is likely due to the fact that Hughes is a white woman and Himes is a Black man; their personal experiences inform different approaches to writing race and its effects

In an article from the Journal of Film and Video entitled “The Lethal Femme Fatale in the Noir Tradition,” Jack Boozer writes: “… the femme fatale of the 1940s is a timely indicator of wartime misgivings about sex roles, marriage, and sexuality” (20). These misgivings are apparent in If He Hollers Let Him Go, as Bob’s interactions with multiple women expose a perspective towards the feminine steeped in these “wartime misgivings,” misgivings predicated upon an increased sense of power and agency afforded to women out of wartime need. This increase of power is interpreted by Bob, a working class Black man, as an encroachment, insult, and danger, given his place in society based on the contemporary racial paradigm.

At the beginning of the novel, we’re introduced to one of Bob’s housemates, a married woman named Ella Mae, with whom he’s been having a casual affair. Ella Mae is a Black housewife with a newborn who seems to have genuine, if not complicated, feelings for Bob. Her presence in the novel serves several purposes, especially at its start. First, she represents the ideal or traditional woman within Bob’s worldview: a woman defined by her roles as a mother, a wife, and a sexual partner. Second, she nurtures and feeds into Bob’s masculinity, providing this particular Black man with a Black woman over whom he can feel superior. In the context of a shifting social order around World War II, Ella Mae might represent the ideal, pre-World War II idea of Black womanhood preferred by Black men in Bob’s position.

Madge, a white woman from the south, is able to exert her power and influence over Bob in the workplace, despite Bob having a role above her. The racism inherent to society at-large elevates her status above Bob. Their workplace itself embodies a sense of the masculine, a repairship at a Navy dockyard, yet Bob’s blackness overrides his masculinity when confronted by Madge’s white femininity. The result is an emasculation unique to the shifting social order created in California around World War II.

As a child of the 20th century, my understanding of race in the United States (specifically the relationship between whiteness and blackness) was informed primarily through a retrospection of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. were central figures of the movement, informing my early understanding of how peaceful protest and civil disobedience successfully resulted in an equitable, colorblind society by the 1990s.

Years later and with much more experience, that naive understanding of race in the United States has been upended and recontextualized by seemingly endless acts of violence: the transatlantic slave trade, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, the Tulsa Race Massacre, the murder of Emmett Till, the War on Drugs, the Flint Water Crisis, the prison industrial complex/modern slavery, and policing have all contributed to a legacy of violence against Black people living in the United States. The White ruling class and those who seek its favor uphold racist institutions, which perpetuates racial violence, resulting in a society that continues to favor certain lives over others.

If He Hollers Let Him Go doesn’t shy away from the violence inherent in American society. As an aspect of noir fiction, violence is a necessary component in depictions of society’s more sinister side. However, writing as a Black man about a Black man, Chester Himes must have found violence an unavoidable trait of any honest depiction of American society. What I find so interesting in retrospect, while attempting to contextualize the novel with its time, is how Himes and his understanding of Blackness and American society speaks to what would come later with Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and everyone and everything else to follow. Himes doesn’t sidestep feelings of rage and the internal yearning for violence experienced by a young and angry Black man. Instead, writing within the genre of noir, Himes explores those feelings, challenging readers to argue against Bob’s rage when presented with the various slights and injustices experienced within a single day.

Himes lived through the Civil Rights Movement and a quick Google search shows that he knew Malcolm X, though I don’t know the details of their relationship. However, as we continue reading, I’ll be interested in deciphering Himes’s personal feelings or ideology regarding the role of violence and rage in response to the realities of racism in the United States.

In Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality, Fredric Jameson writes:

… the principal effect of violence in the American detective story is to allow it to be experienced backwards, in pure thought, without risks, as a contemplative spectacle which gives not so much the illusion of life as the illusion that life has already been lived, that we have already had contact with the archaic sources of that Experience of which Americans have always made a fetish (5).

In both of the works we’ve encountered so far, The Maltese Falcon and Farewell, My Lovely, it is an act of violence that spurs our protagonists towards the action of the plot. Sam Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, is killed while tailing Floyd Thursby, who also winds up killed under mysterious circumstances. Archer’s murder propels Space to investigate the circumstances around his death; he reaffirms this at the end of the novel, saying to Archer’s killer, Brigid O’Shaughnessy: “‘When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it’” (116).

Noir, with its treatment of established forces of power, law enforcement, the private eye outliers, and morally ambiguous side characters, is especially effective when intervening in politics and society. Sam Spade’s response to the violence inflicted upon his partner, a white man of equal standing, speaks to the moral order presumed to exist by Dashiell Hammett. Sam Spade, an aspirational figure of self-assured, white masculinity, juxtaposes the flawed characters we meet through his investigation of the murder: an effeminate man, a fat man, a subserviant boy for hire, and the classic femme fatale. Under Jameson’s notion of the “contemplative spectacle,” readers are made immediately aware of the blight upon each of these characters; their characterization contributes to the larger, broader spectre of immorality that contributed to the killing of Mile’s archer.

Farewell, My Lovely also opens with a murder, the killing of Sam Montgomery by Moose Malloy. The circumstances surrounding the death differ greatly from The Maltese Falcon. Philip Marlowe is investigating a missing person case when he sees a felon, Moose Malloy, attacking a man outside a nightclub. The victim of this violence, a black man at a black establishment in a predominantly black neighborhood, is referred to as “It,” lacking in any sympathy or humanization (5). Marlowe, a white man, approaches the nightclub out of curiosity and is himself accosted by Malloy, also white. Malloy drags Marlowe upstairs and proceeds to batter the club’s black bouncer; Marlowe, with an air of cool, views the scene with a curiosity that suggests he’s less of a hostage and more of an aggressively encouraged coconspirator. It isn’t until Malloy goes into the back and shoots Montgomery, the owner, that Marlowe vocalizes any objection to Malloy’s violence. This opposition is spoken by Marlowe to the terrified barkeep, another black man, who Marlowe belittles and handles roughly.

The rest of the novel unfolds much like The Maltese Falcon, in the sense that its investigation adheres to the structure/form of the “contemplative spectacle” introduced by Jameson. However, unlike Sam Spade’s investigation, Marlowe takes on the case by chance. In his narration, he says: “Nothing made it my business but curiosity. But strictly speaking, I hadn’t had any business in a month. Even a no-charge job was a change” (21).Whereas Sam Spade’s motivation came from a moral order that demands justice for an equal, a fellow white man, Philip Marlowe’s motivation comes simply from a place of curiosity and boredom, plus vague promises from the police for favorable treatment in the future. Farewell, My Lovely’s intervention of politics and society, whether intentional or not, communicates an American reality rooted in racism. Justice isn’t sought for black victims of violence though a necessity of the American moral order; rather, the threat posed by the perpetrator of said violence to society as a whole, potentially other white people, compels law enforcement to act, though they do so apathetically.