Palm Springs Noir

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Ten years ago, when my first noir short story, “Crazy for You,” was published in Orange County Noir, my mother-in-law asked me to define the genre. She read mystery fiction and cozies but wasn’t familiar with noir.

“In noir, the main characters might want their lives to improve and may have high aspirations and goals,” I said, “but they keep making bad choices, and things go from bad to worse.”

Her response was immediate: “Like real life.” We burst into laughter, but it was tinged with the bittersweet pain of knowing.

All of us, at one time or another, have found ourselves in sticky situations with more than a couple of ways we might go. I’d like to think most of us take the high road, the ethical and moral path. In noir, characters follow the highway to doom and destruction. They are haunted by the past, and the line between black and white, right and wrong, dissolves like sugar in water. The hero rationalizes why it’s okay to do whatever dark thing they are about to do.

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