Noir fiction for the modern reader.

Over at the Ink Spot blog today, Darrell James posted a very interesting piece on song lyrics and how they influenced his writing. I would’ve left a comment, but Ink Spot doesn’t take URL signatures, and for some reason they have never accepted my Google ID, so I don’t bother commenting there.

But Darrell’s blog is worth noting. He had met the 1960s folk-rock group the New Christy Minstrels in a parking lot one day and, since he was a longtime fan, happened to have a CD of theirs in his car. They all signed it gladly and promised to buy his book. He went on to say that, as a child of the folk-rock generation, where it’s all about the lyrics and the story, music has played an important role in his writing.

Amen. I spent most of my adult life as a professional musician (piano), playing rock & roll, rhythm & blues, and country for decades. When I first turned to writing, I sat in front of a blank sheet of white paper with a pencil in my hand (I didn’t even own a typewriter in those days) for what seemed like hours. No ideas, no story, no character, nothing. Then, a line from a song flew into my head. It was from The House Of The Rising Sun, a big hit in the 1960s for the Animals. In fact, it was an old folk tune about a girl who is forced to choose between a life of poverty and one of prostitution, knowing that either way, she’s doomed. The line was this one:

I got one foot on the platform, the other foot on the train

I’m goin’ down to New Orleans to wear that ball and chain

Bingo! I was off to the races. I had my lead character, my story, and my setting. Of course, the novel went nowhere, but at least I had one under my belt.

Other novels of mine have started on such flimsy threads. Cadillac’s Comin‘, a rock & roll novel about a one-hit wonder from the 1950s, is about to go up on Kindle as a self-pub. It grew out of two famous lines from the Eagles:

Freedom, oh freedom, that’s just some people talkin’

Your prison is walkin’ through this world all alone.

I have a print novel coming out in a few months from a traditional publisher. It’s a noir effort called The Take, and sprang from possibly the greatest noir song of all time, El Paso by Marty Robbins. These were the lines that gave me the basis for the novel:

Blacker than night were the eyes of Felina, wicked and evil while casting a spell.

My love was deep for this Mexican maiden. I was in love but in vain I could tell.

You know, it just doesn’t get any more noir than that. (I blogged about this song sometime back. It was called “Music Would Play And Felina Would Whirl” and you can access it by clicking on “Personal” under the Categories.)

The thing is, I used to do all of these songs back in my playing days, and those lines always stood out for me. When it came time for me to write novels, the lines just found their way to the front burner and inspired three different books. Maybe there are others waiting their turn. I sure hope so.

Today I spotted a blog by Peter Rozovsky on the Detectives Beyond Borders site, in which he proclaimed He Hit Me by the Crystals to be the greatest noir song ever written. I’d never heard the song before, so I listened to it and it was plenty dark, let me tell you. Peter didn’t mention that the Crystals also recorded Then He Kissed Me, so maybe they were into some kind of career-long story arc, but I’ll leave that for the Crystals purists to dwell on.

It got me thinking about noir songs in general, and after considerable thought, I would nominate the Marty Robbins classic, El Paso, as the greatest noir song of all time.  Written and recorded by Robbins in 1959, it’s set in the lawless West of the late 19th century. Don’t let that fool you, though. This tune is strictly noir from start to finish.

Guy walks into a bar, spots a hot-blooded Mexican babe, watches her dance, gets ideas. Of course, in true noir fashion, you know he’s totally fucked right out of the chute.  Anyway, after a few drinks, he argues over her with another guy. The quarrel escalates until BANG!  Our guy shoots him dead. The dead guy has friends, though, and they begin to move in on our noir protagonist. He runs out the back, steals a horse, and rides away into the night, followed by this makeshift posse.

He gets away clean and is headed for New Mexico when he’s overcome with pangs of love/lust for the girl. Finding that he just can’t bring himself to leave her forever, he heads back to El Paso and to the cantina where she dances. As he does, he’s surrounded by his pursuers, who shoot him down. Mortally wounded, he lies there as the girl rushes to his fallen figure. As he takes his final breath, she kisses him goodbye.

Fade to black.

Cut! Print it!

What makes this even more compelling is this little followup story.

Many years ago, when I was playing music for a living, I did a show with Marty Robbins and he told me he believed that he was that cowboy/central character in a former life! As in “reincarnated”, and he said his memories of that incident were so clear, so strong, that he was able to write a timeless song like El Paso, giving it such a vivid feel. He explained to me exactly what it felt like to watch the girl dance and how he got excited over her, then how shocked he was immediately after killing the other guy during their argument.

I have a noir novel coming out this year called The Take, and I don’t mind admitting that it was heavily influenced by two lines in El Paso:

Blacker than night were the eyes of Felina, wicked and evil while casting a spell.

My love was deep for this Mexican maiden. I was in love, but in vain I could tell.

I even named the girl in my novel Felina.

Come on, you’ll have to admit, that’s pretty noirish. But maybe you’ve got a nomination or two for Greatest Noir Song of All Time.

My short story, Pickup Across The River, has been published on the outstanding online site, A Twist Of Noir.  A crime tale set in New Orleans, it features a touristy couple who are able to make passionate love to each other, then calmly attach silencers to their semiautomatics.  A direct link to the story is on the right of this page under “E-Publications”.

While the story was partly inspired by an old country song by the great Gene Watson, called Love In The Hot Afternoon, it’s not the first thing I’ve written that sprang from a song.  Three of my novels were inspired by just bits of songs, in some cases only two or three lines.  The Take, a noir novel which was recently picked up by L&L Dreamspell Publishing and will be released in 2010, came out of just two lines in the Marty Robbins song, El Paso.  The novel is a contemporary crime story, not a western, but nevertheless, the idea for it was revealed to me in those two lines.

I’ve heard of authors whose novels have emerged from flimsier ingredients:  the sight of rain hitting the street, the way a woman sashays into a bar, a fleeting memory of a long-ago moment, a newspaper headline, even dreams.  Anyone got any such stories they’d like to tell?