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Not fiction, but the real thing: aftermath of a cold-blooded street shooting in Fitzrovia in the 1940s |
The gritty honesty that’s Soho Noir
Dan Carrier learns how London spawned a genre of literature which didn’t celebrate the Mob but reflected the reality of everyday life
W H AUDEN called it the “low, dishonest decade” – a description that could easily be applied to the literature published in the years that became the object of the poet’s disdain.
But while 1930s American pulp fiction featured hard-boiled detectives with rakishly angled trilbies, macs that hid handguns and bottle-blonde femmes fatales waiting in their offices, British versions of the genre were about another world.
Dubbed Soho Noir, it has long been overlooked, despite its realism providing an insight to the streets of London in 1930s. While American fiction of the same period glorified the Mob, telling tales of the good-time gangs of Prohibition, of the supposedly honourable behaviour of the Mafia, its British counterpart of the period is a different concept, and relies on a more honest appraisal of a criminal life.
The closest US authors got to portraying a poverty-driven reality of crime was James M Cain’s tales, and they were written later, in the early 1950s: in the 1930s Cain was still working as a reporter, using his beat to find and store ideas for his later career.
Soho authors Paul Willetts, Iain Sinclair and Cathi Unsworth gave a talk yesterday (Wednesday) at the Wheatsheaf pub in Rathbone Place, on what Soho Noir means – and how it differs from its more popular American counterpart.
Paul Willetts, who has written an introduction to the recently re-released Soho classic The Gilt Kid and a biography of Soho face Julian Maclaren-Ross, is a fan of working-class pulp literature.
“We associate this sort of fiction with America,” says Willetts. “But it has European roots: Film Noir is obviously a French term, and there were French novels which could fall into this genre. It is a sensibility that is recognised across boundaries and appeals to all.”
And he says the British writers who took their cue from their American counterparts managed to create something unique.
“A lot of English fiction of the period was fed by the America fiction of the time, but the writers have tended to be over- looked,” he says. “It has become a sub-genre: there are some really quite obscure novels that were very good and very distinctively English. One of the key facets is the use of slang – and it’s pretty unusual in English novels of the period for this to happen.”
Usually written in a voice of the middle or upper-classes, the roughness of the language used made books like The Gilt Kid stand out.
“The American noir novels had glamour, but the low-life here does not have the glamour,” says Willetts. “The English books are bleaker. There is a stylishness connected to the low-life America characters which the English do not have – they lack the panache. Instead, they have the honesty.”
The London workingclass novel took off during the Depression, partly fuelled by the rise of a mass political consciousness caused by the ideological battles between Left and Right.
There was a market for such writing and it needed its own voice, which was unlikely to be provided by the well-known novelists of the day.
The Bloomsbury and Oxbridge set had their minds on poetry and “higher” literature. The crime tales of Agatha Christie, although popular, featured debutantes, colonels, vicars and doctors, living in sleepy English villages or in far-flung pockets of the Empire. They failed to deal with the everyday desperation of the common criminal.
Instead, it fell to a new generation of authors, who have long been neglected, to bring London’s own crime genre to life.
Among them, and perhaps the most celebrated, is Patrick Hamilton. His trilogy, 20,000 Streets Under The Sky, has a dingy backdrop of pubs in Soho and Mornington Crescent; its heroes inhabit an underworld of desperately lonely men, often infatuated by prostitutes.
His other works also feature petty criminals: George Bone, the unlikely anti-hero in his terrifying novel Hangover Square; Ralph Gorse the wannabe playboy who fleeces women.
Then there is Rope and Gaslight, both which became cinematic by-words for the British film noir.
The term itself may be French but the themes that run through pulp fiction and film that fall in the genre are universal.
The settings for the action can change, from shady bridges over the Seine, impoverished filling stations in Nowheresville, Mid West, through to seedy pubs in Soho.
Giant of the genre
THE Gilt Kid, published by London Books, was James Curtis’s first book, bringing him brief fame in the 1930s. Its story of a burglar searching for his next score on the rain-soaked, night-time streets of the West End, epitomises the Soho Noir genre. It is about a recently released convict with a hardened attitude towards his economic prospects, which in turn has prompted Communist sympathies. But what makes Curtis stand out is his matter-of-fact style and the unsentimental way of dealing with his characters.
He followed it with You’re In The Racket Too, about a lower-middle-class clerk who gets blackmailed by a prostitute. His third novel, There Ain’t No Justice, is the story of a young boxer mercilessly exploited by his manager.
His best-known book came next: They Drive By Night (1938) which the story of an ex-convict who absconds after he is wrongly accused of killing his girlfriend. It was successful as a film, and Curtis managed one more book – What Immortal Hand (1939) tracking the life of a child born into poverty who resorts to crime – before his career was interrupted by war, and he took another 20 years to complete his final book. |
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