have always tended to mirror or influence other types of entertainment. The pulp fiction magazines of the 1930s offered many of the same things westerns, melodramatic 'love stories,' tales of crime and horrorthat could be seen in theaters or heard on the radio during that decade. Even in the 1940s and 1950s, the barely articulated noir sensibility was not confined to movies or literature; on the contrary, it spread across every form of narrative or protonarrative communication. As one instance, consider Entertainment Comics, better known as EC, which in the early 1950s took direct aim at the libido of adolescent boys, specializing in black comedy (Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror), grotesque 'speculative fiction' (WeirdScience), and anarchic satires of pop culture (Mad and its short-lived clone, Panic). At one point, EC adapted a number of short stories by noir novelist Ray Bradbury, and it nurtured a group of stylish, groundbreaking illustrators who borrowed conventions from noirlike movies and pulp magazine covers. The entire EC line was unusually sexy, violent, and iconoclastic. Its two most obviously noir venues, Crime Suspenstories and Shock Suspenstories, were filled with restless suburban marriages, neurotic killers, and corrupt police who administered third-degree punishment to innocent civilians. Drawn in an angular, chiaroscuro style, EC's ten-cent crime anthologies often showed voluptuous women being murdered or tortured, but they also gave vivid treatment to controversial issues such as race prejudice and drug addiction.
Not surprisingly the success of EC prompted an outcry from guardians of morality. In 1954, at the height of the McCarthy era, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham wrote a best-selling expose of the comic industry, The Seduction of the Innocent, which led to a full-scale Senate investigation headed by Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. EC's maj or competitors quickly appointed a censorship board administered by moral czar Judge Charles F. Murphy, which denied an official 'seal of approval' to any comic that used words such as crime, horror, terror, and weird. In response, EC killed off its leading titles and experimented briefly with a melodramatic but 'educational' volume called Psychoanalysis. In 1955, it converted its most popular genres into twenty-five-cent 'picto-fictions' for adultsamong them, Crime Illustrated: Adult Suspense Stories and Shock Illustrated: Adult Psychoanalytical Tales. The company disappeared at about the same time as classic film noir, although its most popular offering, the parodic Mad, metamorphosed into a relatively sanitized and uninventive 'magazine.' Then in the 1980s, with the relaxation of censorship and the reconfiguration of the marketplace, some of its original volumes began to resurface as expensive reprints for nostalgic older adults and affluent teenagers; the volumes were a strong influence on Stephen King, and they eventually inspired a movie and a cable TV series called Tales from the Crypt (19891996). Nearly a third of the shows in the series were adapted from the original EC crime comics and were directed by such figures as John Frankenheimer, Walter Hill, and Robert Zemeckis.
Television and radio have also been crucial to the history and dissemination of noir taste. EC was inspired in part by the dark or horrific radio dramas of the 1940sespecially by CBS's Suspense, which featured the major Hollywood stars of its day. Following in a tradition established by Orson Welles at the same network, Suspense devised ingenious ways to motivate retrospective forms of first-person narration: a dead man (Robert Taylor) leaves a manuscript in a shoe box; an invalid (Agnes Moorehead) makes desperate telephone calls to several people because she suspects that she is about to be murdered; and a killer (Peter Lorre) breaks into a police station and holds the cops at gunpoint, forcing them to listen to the weird story of his crimes. The series often adapted novelists such as Cornell Woolrich and James M. Cain, and at least two of its original scripts Cyril Endfield's 'The Argyle Inheritance' and Lucille Fletcher's 'Sorry, Wrong Number'were later turned into films noirs. Many of its episodes (marketed today as nostalgia radio, with the commercials intact) still have a power to entertain. Among the more compellingly bizarre shows of 1949, for example, were 'Consequence,' starring James Stewart as a doctor who tries to escape a bad marriage by faking his death; 'For Love or Murder,' starring Mickey Rooney as a murderous, romantically infatuated jazz musician who hears drums in his head; and 'The Bullet,'' starring Ida Lupino as a career woman whose success causes her jealous, ex-convict husband to threaten to shoot her.
Suspense was the immediate forerunner of Alfred Hitchcock's hugely successful TV shows of the 1950s and 1960s; indeed, one of its most admired episodes, a 1942 adaptation of Cornell Woolrich's novel The Black Curtain, was filmed by The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1962, under the direction of the young Sydney Pollack. Meanwhile, film noir's most celebrated character type, the hard-boiled private eye, remained a staple of entertainment programs on both radio and television from the 1940s through the 1980s. On radio in the period between 1948 and 1952, Dick Powell was singing-detective Richard Diamond, and Howard Duff was a particularly effective Sam Spade. One of the earliest examples of such characters on TV was Charlie Wild, Private Eye (19501952), a production of CBS, ABC, and Dumont, which freely adapted Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade adventures, concealing the literary source and changing the hero's name because of the HUAC investigations into Hollywood communism (Kevin O'Morrison played Wild, and Cloris Leachman was featured as Effie Perinne). Later in the decade, David Janssen was Richard Diamond, Private Detective (19571960), Philip Carey was Philip Marlowe (19591960), Darren McGavin was Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer (19571960), and Craig Stevens was Peter Gunn (19581961).
The best-known police procedural on U.S. radio and television from 1949 until the early 1970s was Jack Webb's increasingly bland and conservative Dragnet, which evolved from He Walked by Night (1949), and which, in its later episodes, costarred Webb and Harry Morgan, who had acted together as a pair of heavies in another film noir called Appointment with Danger (1951). (Webb's wide-screen and color movie version of Dragnet in 1954 was also inflected with noirlike photographic and performance conventions, as was his 1955 movie and radio series entitled Pete Kelly's Blues.) Other TV productions derived from classical noir include Naked City (19581963), the BBC's Third Man (19591964), and Mike Hammer, who resurfaced in a successful series featuring Stacy Keach (19841987). In the same years as the last of these shows, ITV in London produced a series of artful, atmospheric adaptations of Raymond Chandler's short stories, featuring Powers Boothe as Philip Marlowe. At this point, the classic private eye was becoming an antique, but he could be brought up to date by transforming him into a somewhat yuppiefied, postfeminist type, as in Robert B. Parker's Spencer novels and TV show (19851988) and in John Sayles's exceptionally good series of TV dramas entitled Shannon's Deal (19891991). He could also become a certified born loser, as in a made-for-cable thriller like Third- Degree Burn (1989).
It would require a small book merely to list all the burnt-out police officers and philosophical private eyes in American pop culture over the past three decades. Both genders and nearly all sexual inclinations have been represented by such figures, and every large city in the country has been mapped by them. Among the cop shows and criminal adventures on U.S. television, The Fugitive (319631967) and Miami Vice (19841989) are particularly important to the history of noir. Consider as well two expensively produced British exports, Cracker and Prime Suspect, which not only depict a society in decay but also make the detective protagonists seem almost as darkly compulsive as the criminals. These and some of the other examples I have mentioned are sometimes only remotely noirlike, but we should recognize that they all have familial connections with the classical thrillers of the 1940s, which they often acknowledge. The eponymous hero of Cracker, for instance, has a Bogart poster on the wall in his house. When producer-director Blake Edwards turned his highly successful Peter Gunn TV series into a rather bad movie called Gunn (1967), he staged the climax in a hall of mirrors that was reminiscent of The Lady from Shanghai. In one episode of the Mike Hammer TV series in the late 1980s, director Ray Danton did the same thing, achieving somewhat better results than Edwards on a lower budget.
At the very least, we need to recognize that noir is a much more flexible, pervasive, and durable mood, style, or narrative tendency than is commonly supposed and that it embraces different media and different national cultures throughout the twentieth century. Contrary to what Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward tell us on the first page of their indispensable encyclopedia of Hollywood noir, the form in question does not constitute 'a self-contained reflection of [post-World War II] American cultural preoccupations,' and it is certainly not 'the unique example of a
