Embracing the darkness of Southern Noir
- Brandi Bradley
- Apr 1
- 5 min read
Since I have been talking more about being a writer and about my latest novel, Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder, I get this question a lot … why Southern Noir?
Which is an interesting question to me because I’m like, why not Southern Noir?
Usually when people think about noir, they think of the movies. The detective in the black and white office space, the fedora, the glass of whiskey, the lady in the doorframe with the glorious hair, and the fist fights. They associate it with a specific time period. They associate it with LA.
But noir has shifted over the years. While the assumptions about noir stories have changed but some standards remain.
Noir as a genre has a few conventions:
The detective (either amateur or official)
The call to action on a case (either assigned or voluntary)
The femme fatale, (can be any gender)
The friend/family/associate of the victim that may or may not be trusted
The bigger conspiracy/ association with a corrupt agency
Two cases become one
A satisfying but not quite happy ending.
Megan Abbott cast her noirs in high schools or ballet studios. Tana French set hers in Dublin, sometimes with the Murder Squad and sometimes with civilians looking for answers.
If these are acceptable, then all of these elements can absolutely exist in stories that take place in the South. In fact there are already many noirs already set in the South, like Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone or Attica Locke’s Bluebird Bluebird.
I’ve lived in a variety of places in Tennessee, Kentucky, Florida, and now Georgia. And in all of the places I have lived – small and large – these places are filled with whispers, secrets, disappearances, and smiling politicians who will stab you in the back to improve their polling numbers.
The South is also an excellent place for noir because Hollywood is not the only place where naive but ambitious people migrate to improve their life. Think of all the songbirds that flock to Nashville, or the rainbow lights of the drag scene in Atlanta, or those young people who joined a tech start up co-work space in Opelika only to be bilked out of their investment money from a smooth talking tech con artist.
I’ve yet to take on large city noir. I might not ever have the courage to try to write a noir about Atlanta, because you have to understand a city to write about it and I don’t know if my 13 years of living in the suburbs would provide me the appropriate mindset. But I like and feel like I understand small towns. I think often when people think of small towns – these gorgeous picturesque countrysides – they assume that these towns are like Mayberry where Andy and Barney are the only lawmen and the worst crime is trespassing. Even on episodes of Dateline, they will write copy for Keith Morrison to state in honeyed tones, “No one ever expects anything bad to happen here, until…”
Small towns in the South as ideal settings for noir because there are so many places in the South to hide, meet conspiratorially, or just do bad things things. In LA Confidential, the final shoot out happens in an abandoned motel. We got lots of those, as well as tobacco barns, salt silos, grain mills, and pecan orchards. There are plenty of locales where people can be up to no good.
I still have a lot to learn about this genre I love. I didn’t come out the womb requesting Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. In fact even in those early days of reading, I never cared much for Encyclopedia Brown or tried to borrow someone’s tattered copies of Agatha Christie stories. But I did obsessively watch Moonlighting, soap operas, and every Movie of the Week. I watched Murder She Wrote at one grandma’s house and Unsolved Mysteries at the other’s. But my reading time was devoted to romances, gothic stories, and mysteries full of secrets, betrayal, and things not being what they seem.
It’s been kind of a journey to get me here. I never really had a genre before. I tried out a lot of different things, and could only call them … I don’t know … literary? And when I was in grad school I shared with a writing class how I was obsessed with the ID Channel. This was soon after it launched and didn’t have a lot of programming, other than a few series with a lot of bad reenacting. My mentor asked me, “Would you ever write a mystery?” and I said, “I want to but I’m worried about going to the dark place.” And that was what was holding me back, I think. I was trying to write cute things, funny things, romantic things and they weren’t connecting. The comments I would get were, “Your humor is so dark.” or “this story sounds like my nightmare” or “this is good but I feel like you’re holding back.” And I didn’t know how to respond. I was unaware that my humor was dark. I was unaware that my stories could be dark. I had no idea how to not hold back.
But when I did an assessment of what I wanted to consume as a writer and what I was inspired to write, I found myself winnowing down to noirs, much like a vast NCAA bracket of different types of mystery genres. I knew I liked crime. I then realized I liked mysteries. They I realized I liked detectives. And eventually I landed on a list of the 100 greatest noir movies of all time and shared it with my husband proclaiming, “I like most of these!”
It felt like relief. This is what I like! I love noirs! Can we watch more noirs, please?
And then I wrote one, and it’s like my life has simplified even further. What do you write? I write noirs! What’s your next book? It will also be a noir! I heard you wrote a short story. Yes! It is also a noir!
I shared with a class of students this week, “I didn’t realize that my darkness was an attribute until I stopped trying to squash it.”
And at times I think, what if I get bored with it?
So what if I do. PJ Harvey burns her clothes after every album because it’s time to embody a new form. If I decide I am sick of it, I can also write other things. But for now, I am accepting and embracing my own brand of darkness.
XOXO,
B.
Feel free to check out my noir, Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder available in Paperback and Digital Download at the Shop.
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