To my shame, it’s been more than two weeks since I’ve posted a new entry here. I’ll try to not let that happen again.

During those two weeks, something happened which I think began germinating long ago with some Christians (I for one) making decisions based on the “need” for money. And since this happening could well have concluded with a murder or two, I consider it the stuff of Christian noir. Perhaps I’ll write about it sometime after the smoke clears.

For now, though, I want to clarify why noir fiction is valuable (for some of us necessary) reading.

Sara Vogan was a lovely woman, spirited and bright, whom I counted as one of my closest friends from my time in the U of Iowa Writers Workshop. After Iowa, when I was teaching at California State U, Chico, and Sara was living in San Francisco, I spent several weekends hanging out with her. We both loved blues, and spent good times at the S.F. Blues Festival.

Sara had a big heart, and was vulnerable to depression. And she never had enough money, a fact that conspired with other stuff to prompt or deepen her spells of depression.

She had sold film rights to her novel In Shelly’s Leg to Diane Keaton. Each year she received a small option and promises, which kept her from either taking or keeping good university teaching jobs. Her reason, or rationale, for turning them down or quitting them was location. She wanted to continue to live in San Francisco, which she considered an artistic and vital place.

But she couldn’t afford to live there, at least without poverty driving the depression deeper into her heart. She fought the depression with liquor and pills.

My friend Vicki called and told me that Sara had died. I don’t know if it was suicide or accidental overdose, but it was pills and liquor.

When I got off the phone with Vicki, I picked up a book, hoping to distract from my sorrow. The book was Charles Willeford’s Pickup. The main character is an alcoholic artist who refuses to leave San Francisco. That decision, among others, begins his descent toward perdition. I read it in one long night (which I never do), and came away feeling as if I understood Sara in ways I otherwise wouldn’t have.

I live in San Diego, and I know plenty folks who, like Sara, are in danger of getting killed by obsession with trying to live in such a “desirable place.” I told one of them just yesterday, Look, I love you, like I loved Sara, so get the hell out of here.

If I hadn’t read Pickup, I wouldn’t have understood. And maybe I wouldn’t have written The Do-Re-Mi.

Lot’s of readers insist that stories ought to have happy endings. At the risk of appearing maudlin, I’ll suggest that happy endings rarely teach us much. And to proceed through this treacherous world and help others do so, we’d best learn all we can. Such as the lesson of Bakker and Falwell, which I’ll write about one of these days, maybe soon.

Not that I agree with the philosopher Pascal that we should avoid stories with happy endings, but we also need doses of grim reality as warnings about what to avoid, and we learn best while being held captive by a great story.

Maybe I shouldn’t presume people know the term noir. And since the term has been used to describe a variety different sorts of literature and film, I’ll try to give a coherent if simplified definition .

In a pure sense, noir presents a dark attitude toward both the world the story inhabits (in film this may appear as dark or drab colors) and toward the human condition (represented by a characters whose bad choices lead to perdition or ruin.) A few favorites of mine: James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, Jim Thomson’s The Grifters, Charles Willeford’s Pickup, and Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mister Ripley.

Detective stories from the ‘30s and ‘40s and more recent ones that evolved out of the hardboiled tradition are often labeled noir, as they share a world view with the above, only instead of the protagonist being the tragic character, the protagonist is the detective who heroically though futilely attempts to bring at least a morsel of justice to a corrupt and perilous world. Some favorites of mine are Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Ross MacDonald’s The Underground Man, Touch of Evil, by Robert Wade and William Miller, and the film Chinatown.

One remarkable aspect of No Country for Old Men (see my earlier blogging on the film) is that it combines the two kinds of noir described above, with Josh Brolin’s character finding a bag of money and making a tragic choice and Tommy Lee Jones’ character fulfilling the noir detective role.

When I was moderating the noir panel at the Left Coast Crime conference in Denver, a person in the audience asked something like, “Doesn’t all the slicing of noir up into sub-genres like sci-fi noir, east coast noir, future noir, cowboy noir or whatever dilute the essence of what noir is?”

That question stuck with me. I wondered if defining stories as Christian noir was snatching some of the guts out something vital. Co-opting art, like marketers do.

Here’s the answer that came to me. Christian noir, in my mind, is not a sub-genre, because ‘Christian’ in this context isn’t part of a compound noun. It’s an adjective. It’s describing an attitude or thematic stance taken by certain stories that can also legitimately be called ‘noir.’ In fact, I prefer to think of ‘noir’ as an adjective, a description rather than a thing. And adjectives are both useful and inevitable.

So I’ll carry on, and throw out a tentative definition of this descriptive compound adjective Christian noir. I’ll call it applicable to stories that feature characters who consider themselves Christian, who are developed in more complexity than just being good or bad, and who by their own inclination, or weakness, or by their inability to effectively contend with events and/or circumstances, descend into a situation that approximates hell, and who at least have a chance for redemption.