Review: The Best American Noir of the Century

The Best American Noir of the Century by James Ellroy
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I have decided to assign this text for one of my classes, but I’m doing it under protest. It’s thick enough that I can get some good material from it, but, on balance, it falls far short of the kind of book I’m looking for.

James Ellroy is the most important voice in American noir since Elmore Leonard, but he and I have a very different idea about just what “noir” means. For me, noir is an applied ethics. Picking up where Hemingway left off, it asks us to orient our moral compasses in a world where there is no essential “good.” That is, in a universe where – as Hemingway put it in “Clean, Will-Lighted Place” – the divine has been replaced with the hallowed name of “nada,” we have to figure out our own sense of what is right.

When I read Ellroy, I see him grappling with such questions. When I hear him talk about it, though, I hear him playing up the shock value. In his fiction, he has an unrivalled capacity to strip away the comforting fictions of the modern world. In his commentary, though, he likes to play up the ways he embraces things that horrify others.

As a result, Ellroy opens this anthology with the short story behind the classic film Freaks instead of with something that reflects the existential angst of Hemingway. It is, as far as I’m concerned, a misunderstanding of the tradition.

I could forgive that misdirection more fully if it weren’t for the fact that many of the stories he subsequently selects are also saturated in shock. That is, many are simply not that good. I can forgive some lame stories in an anthology that purports to collect the best work of a given year. But when you have a whole century to choose among?

There has to be better David Goodis – whose novels are often terrific – than the cliched “Professional Man.” There has to be something more subtle than Jim Thompson’s “Forever After.” There has to be a better choice from the intriguing Patricia Highsmith than “Slowly, Slowly in the Wind.” And those are some of the greats and near-greats who have to be included in an anthology with this ambition. There are a number of others by less significant writers like James W. Hall, William Gay, and Andrew Klavan that make me say “huh?” I read more compelling work in most issues of the sometimes excellent neo-pulps like Plots with Guns or Pulp Modern.

Anyway, there are plenty of good pieces here, including Ellroy’s own “Since I Don’t Have You,” Dennis Lehane’s extraordinary “Running Out of Dog,” Dorothy Hughes’s “The Homecoming,” Joyce Carol Oates’s “Faithless,” Elmore Leonard’s “When the Women Come Out to Dance,” and Bradford Morrow’s “The Hoarder,” but many of those are obvious candidates for an anthology like this.

As a bottom line, the batting average is simply too low. I can make this work for a class since I can curate the good stuff for my students, but I wish it were worthy of its title and ambition. Noir has a powerful history, one that’s more evident in film and in the novel. I hope someone, someday, delivers the short story collection that tradition deserves.


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