Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime sorts out the difference between “noir” and “hardboiled” for Matthew Baldwin.
A noir story can be grim and suspenseful or grim and melancholy or grim and paranoid or grim and fatalistic—but it’s pretty much always grim. Its antecedents in literature include Oedipus, King Lear, and the work of Thomas Hardy; ‘noir’ posits a world in which either there is no god and men are left to make their way in a universe that’s indifferent to justice and to their suffering or else a universe that is actively malign…