Term used originally as the equivalent of the English ‘Gothic novel’, but more recently to cover the broad territory of the ‘thriller’. Whatever the genre owes to Gaboriau, Gaston Leroux, and Leblanc, its immediate sources are to be found in the ‘hard-boiled’ detective fiction of 1920s and 1930s America (Hammett, Whitfield, Burnett) and the gangster movie. Serious writing in this genre has had some difficulty in maintaining itself against the mass-produced collections of ‘brigadisme’ published by Gérard de Villiers, Pierre Lucas, André Burnat, etc., and calling upon the services of writers such as Antoine Dominique, Michel Brice, and Jean-Pierre Bourre; these collections have added sadistic and pornographic resources to the roman noir's already violent tendencies.
It is not difficult to agree with Todorov that the roman noir differs fundamentally from the roman policier. In the roman policier, the crime (usually single) is committed before the narrative (or at its very beginning) by a criminal whom it is the detective's job to identify, in a single narrative; the detective works on his own and is impelled by the desire to defend the moral order. In the roman noir, multiple crimes are committed as an ongoing feature of multiple narratives, by criminals whose identity is known and whom it is the heroes' job to destroy (rather than apprehend); the heroes are usually part of an organization and are paid to defend a political order.
[Clive Scott]
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