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This book is a collection of critical essays on “noir fiction,” which was first written in the US in the 1930s. Noir fiction has not been an object of serious study to date, because it has been regarded as no more than one genre of popular fiction depicting the world of outlaws, mainly criminals, as protagonists. This book focuses on the epoch of the genre and analyzes its historical and literary significance.
 
Chapter One contains a general outline of the entire book. This chapter notes that noir fiction emerged at the time of the Great Depression and underlines the fact that noir fiction depicting socially vulnerable people originally came under the genre of social critique. The chapter also points out that the narrative structure of noir fiction is made up of three points: a protagonist (1) is placed in a stagnant condition, (2) wishes to escape from the situation, (3) and fails to do so, and, by taking examples from different works, emphasizes that each point subsumes issues in (American) literature; “realism,” “romance,” and “tragedy.”
 
Chapter Two aims to uncover the characteristics of noir fiction by further discussing two topics in detail. In “Possibilities of Noir Fiction and Film Noir,” the book focuses on film noir, the film genre based on noir fiction which became popular in the 1940s, and examines the characteristics of each genre by studying the impact that fiction and films had on each other. In “The Case of the Femme Fatale: Poetics of Hardboiled Detective Fiction,” the book looks into one form of noir fiction, “a hard-boiled detective fiction,” and compares works by leading writers, especially by studying how “femme fatale” is dealt with, and explores literary possibilities of hard-boiled (and noir) Fiction.
 
Chapter Three narrows down the focus of the discussion to different works of the most important noir fiction writer, Dashiell Hammett. The chapter suggests that Hammett was not a mere detective story writer but rather comes close to issues that resonated within the literature of modernism of his contemporaries by using the format of detective stories.
 
Chapter Four chronologically categorizes and introduces noir fiction of the early period, mainly published before the Second World War. To date, noir fiction has been labeled as a popular fiction, and much of noir fiction including important works remain untranslated. The purpose of this book is to contribute to future research on noir fiction by commenting on such works.
 

(Written by SUWABE Koichi, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology / 2017)