Copenhagen Noir

Bo Tao Michaëlis, Naja Marie Aidt, Jonas T. Bengtsson, Christian Dorph, Simon Pasternak, Susanne Staun, Helle Helle, Georg Ursin, Klaus Rifbjerg, Gretelise Holm, Kristian Lundberg, Kristina Stoltz, Seyit Öztürk, Benn Q. Holm, Gunnar Staalesen, Lene Kaaberbøl, Agnete Friis Copenhagen Noir

© 2011 Akashic Books

Translated by Mark Kline

Copenhagen map by Aaron Petrovich

Akashic Noir Series

Copenhagen demands time.

– Dan Turèll

INTRODUCTION

THESEAMYSIDE OFMODERNISM

The French word for black is currently an often (mis) used trendy word for irrational and uncontrollable crime, a melodramatic, spectacular, and thrilling intrigue in an entertaining story that begins well but ends badly. The word gained this interpretation in the postwar world of the 1940s, after the launch of a French series of hard-boiled books, “Série Noire,” written by American, English, and French authors, from Dashiell Hammett to Cornell Woolrich and Raymond Chandler, to Georges Simenon and Léo Malet. Black on black, death never gives credit and life is short and dirty, like a kid’s shirt. Yet, what does noir mean nowadays with regards to concept, style, and genre?

Noir is the story of the fateful coincidence, the precarious absurdity and bitter nonchalance of life. It speaks of loss of control and lack of insight, of irrationality’s impact on what seems to make sense-the throw of the dice that didn’t win, to put it simply. The style is minimalistic, open, and terse. It attempts to describe an unpredictable calamity rather than any act of clear rationality. Capturing the murderer is neither what’s necessary nor important. Because noir is seldom interested in illuminating a valid truth or forming clarity, it rarely seeks a transparent understanding that it doesn’t believe in anyway. Noir is the crime genre’s bleak nostalgia and, at the same time, its unsentimental vision of modern times; without degenerating into cheap puritanism or bigoted abstinence, it often includes sexuality, and more in the light of being used destructively than as any romantic idealism. A noir story seldom has a happy ending. When it does happen, such as in Chandler’s Philip Marlowe books, it is with a bittersweet taste of compromise or bargaining. Life goes on with a wounded soul, and only that which is lost is eternal. Past, present, and future melt into one synchronous now, which cancels out every hope that times change and things will be better. As a famous title from a noir writer, Horace McCoy, puts it: kiss tomorrow goodbye, because nothing will be there at daybreak.

Noir is disillusionment and melancholy in relation to the big city, the melting pot of modernism. Some classic noir stories do take place in the country, but the metropolis appears either as modernism’s revenge or as temptations fallen for in the past that now must be paid for; it often involves cold revenge, heated confrontation, old love, or as all three at the same time and place.

The most archetypical noir short story is Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers,” originally published in Scribner’s in 1927. Two hit men arrive in a country town to shoot a newcomer with a big-city past. It doesn’t happen, they don’t find him that day, but as the narration progresses, we readers know from reading between the lines that it is only a question of time before the killing takes place. Such is life in noir-you can’t avoid your fate; at the most you can delay it and hope that death comes quickly and relatively painlessly as the long sleep that we all must enter at some given point in our lives.

Noir loves flight, ill-fated love, the cold avenger. You could say that Alexander Dumas’s classic novel of revenge from 1844, The Count of Monte Cristo, is the first noir novel, with its lengthy and cold-blooded reprisal that can be traced back to the main character’s disadvantaged, unfair, and virtually psychopathic past. Others identify Greek tragedy, with its gruesome destinies and lack of redeeming Providence, as the oldest forerunner of the genre.