

Chandler would be green as a goblin with jealousy.įirst person narration/the monologue of a body. And throughout, her gorgeous, sharp, breathtaking language is gorgeously on display. Megan Abbott’s early novels, including my personal favorite, Queenpin, are noir classic throwbacks, given a feminist and female-centered slant.

But a writer who has mastered the chewy language that makes you slow down and truly savor a page, Chandler-style, without in any way imitating Chandler, is Megan Abbott. You can spot any writer who has read too much Raymond Chandler because he’s usually trying to unsuccessfully channel Chandler’s gorgeously bonkers metaphors and similes (the famous “tarantula on a slice of angel food” comes to mind).
#Sunset beach tv tropes update
But that’s not to say that I didn’t have plenty of examples to lean on for ways to update the noir traditions.įrom Vicki Hendricks to Tod Goldberg, here are examples of writers who took on noir tropes, and reinvigorated them in new, surprising, and totally fresh ways.

#Sunset beach tv tropes full
That meant expanding her into a full character, with a full spread of feeling not usually given to the femme fatale in traditional noir literature. In my debut novel, The Lady Upstairs, I wanted to take one of those most familiar of noir tropes-the femme fatale-and flip the lens so that she got to take center stage in a story.

Those tropes are both a challenge and an opportunity for writers: there’s so many ways to become a cliche, low rent Raymond Chandler, and also so many opportunities to remake something out of the familiar into something new. When I’m asked to explain noir, too often I fall back on that old pornographic clarification: “I know it when I see it.” But the truth is, noir has traditionally rested heavily on the value of familiar tropes (as does any genre deeply entrenched and well known) and that familiar ground is what makes noir so immediately recognizable-as well as so easy to get wrong, or make stale. Снорклинг в национальном заповеднике Port Launay.Noir is alive and well and probably will never die (despite the fact that most people of my acquaintance don’t seem to know what it is when I share that I’ve written a feminist noir).
