Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

II. The Cinematic and Social Background
to Film Noir
1 Cultural and Literary Influences on Film Noir
1.1 “Hard­boiled” Crime Fiction
I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a redhaired
mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship
at Butte. He also called a shirt a shoit. I didn’t think
anything of what he had done to the city’s name.
Later I heard men who couldn’t manage their r’s
give it the same pronunciation. I still didn’t see
anything in it but the meaningless sort of humour
that used to make richardsnary the thieves’ word
for dictionary. A few years later I went to
Personville and learned better. (Hammett, Red
Harvest, 1929)
The literary origins of film noir are easily found by the majority of film critics in
the hard-boiled or tough-guy school of fiction that proliferated in the early twenties with a
range of names, from Ernest Hemingway to John O’Hara with his Appointment in Samarra
(1934). When digging into the roots of this type of writing, one can go as far back as 1896
with Frank Munsey’s Argosy, an adult magazine. He is the one credited with the idea of
using cheap wood-pulp paper, which soon replacing the dime novel became the most massproduced
consumer magazine and reading material in America. However, true hard-boiled
fiction only developed through the twenties and during the severe Depression years, a time
when magazines, commonly referred to as pulps, were flourishing.
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