Macbeth were caused by his obsession with a prophecy about being The King of Scotland, but then it doomed his life and Richard III the jealousy of King
Edward IV’s brother upon his throne.
1. The Origin of Noir Thriller
In the early period of noir thriller, the term ‘noir’ was more associated with style rather than a genre, referring to the stories about criminals which were
published in pulp magazine around the nineteenth century. Noir thriller was getting more specifica
lly defined through W.R. Burnett’s Little Caesar. Besides presenting ‘the protagonist who consciously exceeds the law’, the social and
economic contexts were portrayed in the story as well since the work was strongly influenced by Wall Street Crash. It narrated how crime which was mostly
committed by urban gangsterism was easily to emerge as caused by economic depression. Cruelty, harassment, and society’s moral breaker were then noted by
John G. Cawelti in Scaggs, 2005: 109 as the main focuses of noir thriller. On the other hand, the development of noir thriller was also much associated
with psycho thriller. Before noir was defined, psycho thriller was popular as being the influence of American hard-boiled to emerge. It is one of the sub-genres of
detective fictions which explore more about the investigating process. It is interested in the way the detective finds out the suspects’ motive or their
psychological state related to the crime committed. It gained popularity in around 1920s to 1940s and were mostly represented through the works of Dashiell
Hammet and Raymond Chandler Jalova, 2007.
American hard-boiled stories was also popular in France, so that Marcel Duhamel translated them in Serie Noire
1946, including Dashiel Hammet’s works. Serie Noire was also noted as the emergence of roman noir
—the French words of black novels. Jean Jacques Schleret, a literary scholar who first officially
used the term ‘noir’, argued that among its development, the word has different referential in France and Americ
a. Since 1946 in France, ‘noir’ is referred as the hardboiled novels. However, America adapted ‘noir’ as the concept in literature
after it was used in film critics by Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in their book Hollywood in Forties 1968. Inspired by
Jim Thompson’s novels The Getaway, Pop 1280, and A Hell of a Woman
, ‘noir’ in America was then associated with ‘blackness’, representing the crime in the story and how
Thompson delivered the crime in more intense way than the hardboiled genre. Gifford
1984 argued that ‘noir’ is also the best word to describe the world of the stories despair, devastation, and bad luck which is tougher than the characters of
hard-boiled novels live in Tuttle, 2006. Thus, this research is focused on the American’s development in defining noir
thriller. Even though the definition of noir thriller was influenced by the hard- boiled detective stories, it is important to look back that the genre was firstly
influenced by psycho thriller. It is no wondered that noir thriller has the characteristics as what thriller also does Simpson in Rzepka and Horsley, 2010.
Noir is less interested in the role of a detective as written in Little Caesar 1929 by W.R. Burnett in which he put a gangster as the protagonist of the story. Martin
Rubin in Chapman, 2000: 144 also identified that the works of noir thriller are
able to produce the feeling and sensation which are not occupied in the casual detective stories. Noir thriller shows the intense involvement of the protagonist
— who is not necessarily a detective
—in decision making. Moreover, rather than leaning much on the detective’s procedures, it deeply explores the characters’ fear
and anxiety. It figures out how the people face their low and high points in live. It narrates how the people behave and how their habit may lead them into unluckier
fate.
2. Noir Thriller in American Literature
