A detail from the cover of National Book Award-winning author Denis Johnson's latest novel Nobody Move. (HarperCollins)

The publication of a new Thomas Pynchon book is always an event, but the appearance last week of Inherent Vice, his seventh novel, was downright startling. For the first time in his career, the renowned recluse is participating in a trend: he and a growing number of literary novelists are turning to the noir genre.

Defined by post-9/11 paranoia and economic collapse, the last few years offer a rich context for a noir resurgence.

Since winning the Booker Prize for The Sea (2005), John Banville has published three crime novels under the decidedly noir alias Benjamin Black. In 2007, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) gave us the alternate-universe noir The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005) was a departure from his typically philosophical Westerns, and this spring, Denis Johnson followed up his National Book Award-winning Vietnam opus Tree of Smoke with the slender noir “homage” Nobody Move.

Why should the roman noir attract such a celebrated group? On one level, it offers a pleasurable respite from the toil of writing “serious” fiction. Banville told the British TV program The Book Show that the Benjamin Black novels are “so much easier to write than my John Banville books, so I’m sort of addicted to them .… I write Benjamin Black out of the top of my head; I write John Banville somewhere further down.” Even if this is the case, why this particular genre — and why now?

Although noir is not specific to the U.S. — Britain and France, for instance, have their own traditions — the genre has always resonated with the state of the American nation. The term “noir” was coined in 1946 by French critics to describe a cycle of American B-movies that would run from the Second World War through the 1950s. The scripts were frequently based on pulpy short stories and novels (which critics have retrospectively declared noir).

Booker prize-winning author John Banville, author of the Benjamin Black crime series. (Brendan McDermid/Reuters)

The protagonists of early noir narratives are often returning to the U.S. from battlefields abroad. Damaged by their experiences in the army, they have difficulty readjusting to everyday life. In her book The Noir Thriller, literary critic Lee Horsley notes that noir protagonists “can be victims, transgressors, or investigators,” but they are never “the confident, all-solving investigators” found in “classic detective fiction.” Even the so-called good guys are vulnerable and easily captivated by the underworld. Jacques Tourneur’s seminal 1947 film Out of the Past (based on Geoffrey Homes’s book Build My Gallows High) is a textbook example: a private investigator becomes romantically involved with the ex-girlfriend of a rich client who has stolen money from him.

Vintage noir films typically feature shadowy lighting, canted angles and surreal dream or drug scenes, but because they were bound by Hollywood’s Production Code, they ultimately conform to the idea that crime and deviance must be punished. Their source novels, however, were often more sensational and morally ambiguous.

For Horsley, “the noir sensibility may come to the fore at any time of discontent and anxiety, of disillusionment with institutional structures and loss of confidence in the possibility of effective agency.” The last few years, defined by post-9/11 paranoia and economic collapse, offer a rich context for a noir resurgence.

The books don’t need to be set in the present to reflect contemporary unrest. Inherent Vice takes place in Los Angeles County in 1970, a time when the hippie dream was being trampled on. References to the Charles Manson trial abound, while the existence of ARPAnet (a precursor to the internet) leads one character to predict that “someday everybody’s gonna wake up to find they’re under surveillance they can’t escape.” Dishonest policemen and sinister forces lurk everywhere, following private investigator Larry “Doc” Sportello as he tries to help an ever-increasing number of femme fatales who ask him to track down missing persons.

It seems that in the West, we have lost the belief that tough-talking action-hero types will lead us out of our dire political and economic straits — George W. Bush-style rhetoric is well out of date. These days, we’re more likely to sympathize with imperfect figures that recognize their own inadequacy to navigate through convoluted plots. In Inherent Vice, Sportello does his pot-addled best to uncover a shadowy conspiracy called The Golden Fang, which is involved in everything from drug-running to tax-dodging to brainwashing to murder, and seems to be behind the disappearances he’s investigating. Meyer Landsman, the shambolic detective in Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, pursues a cold case despite the meddling of his superior, who also happens to be his ex-wife. The protagonist in Nobody Move is an insecure gambling addict who attempts to save himself and a beautiful woman from torturous killers.

(Penguin Books Canada)

Since the days of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, noir’s dark atmosphere has been delivered with tautly crafted prose — an obvious attraction for any writer of literary fiction. Banville set his first two Benjamin Black novels (Christine Falls and The Silver Swan) in 1950s Dublin, which is overseen by “sagging palls of cloud,” and his third, The Lemur, in contemporary “gray Manhattan,” which sulks “steamily under a drifting pall of April rain.” The times and places are united in their exquisitely rendered bleakness. An extended passage in Inherent Vice, about how “offshore winds” created a feeling of “heat and restlessness” and “everybody’s dreams got disarranged,” reads not only like classic, off-the-wall Pynchon but also like a riff on Chandler’s 1938 story Red Wind, where a hot desert wind in Santa Ana makes “nerves jump” and “skin itch” and spurs a series of desperate characters to confusion and brutality.

For literary writers seeking a change of pace, the noir genre is ideal. It isn’t terribly restrictive — Horsley prefers to call it a “network of ideas” rather than a genre per se. And yet it has immediate, wide appeal — The Lemur and Nobody Move were serialized in The New York Times and Playboy, respectively. Up till now, Pynchon’s outrageously complex fiction has been deemed unfilmable, yet L.A.’s Creative Artists Agency — home to the likes of Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and LeBron James — is reportedly shopping around Inherent Vice’s movie rights.

Lounging on the beach with a straight-ahead thriller may still be enticing, but it’s cooler to crawl into the shade with a good roman noir — you’ll be led on a funhouse ride through a vertiginous darkness that isn’t, in the end, very removed from our own.

Inherent Vice is in stores now. The second edition of Lee Horsley's The Noir Thriller will be published later this year by Palgrave Macmillan.

Mike Doherty is a writer based in Toronto.