Unreal Cities: the Veterans’ Homecoming and the Fate of Postwar Noir

Abstract

Noir fiction was shaped, in the aftermath of World War II, by a generation of ex-servicemen who wrote, under the guise of crime stories, about the difficulty of returning to American cities and civilian life. Their often paranoid tales of victimization, violence and murder dramatize the homecoming veteran’s radical estrangement from his alienated and alienating city and community. Sometimes the gulf between the two can be bridged, and the stories highlight reaffiliation and reintegration. Sometimes it cannot, and they foreground flight and exclusion. This article looks at the emotional premises, narrative patterns and political implications of these tales, thus suggesting that the main aesthetic and ideological traits of postwar noir grew out of the veterans’ foundational and problematic experience of homecoming.

Keywords

• noir fiction
• hardboiled fiction
• pulp fiction
• paperbacks
• World War II
• city