The word ‘noir’ is French for dark. Noir fiction is usually about corrupt systems and individuals and hard-boiled characters with good hearts making bad decisions in gritty urban settings. Think Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and male detectives solving crimes involving dead women.
In Dead Ends, debut author Samantha Byres adapts this style into contemporary rural noir set in small-town New Zealand/ Aotearoa. The story follows a female protagonist: hard-boiled, libidinous hot mess Nell Jenkins who has come home from Sydney to care for her ailing mother.
Nell is drifting in life and doesn’t have much going on other than regular tawdry sexual encounters. These encounters set her on a path of unwittingly engaging a charismatic psychic to search for the truth about Nell’s dead best friend and aunt.
Byres flips the detective noir script usually featuring men in mean streets. So while Raymond Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe feels ‘like the box the cat gave birth in’, Nell wakes up with her body a ‘sack of flesh, oozing liquor fumes’. She drives a Subaru Impreza through the mean streets of working-class New Zealand and her jobs are in a call centre and aged care.
The sex scenes are gritty, graphic and queer, bringing the noir genre juicily into the twenty-first century.
Graphic sex does not necessarily make a good story though and the book’s theme of ‘decades and decades of dead girls’ who are ‘dotted all over this country’ is where Dead Ends got interesting for this reader.
Rather than only focusing on the conventional ‘solve the crime’ narrative, Byres zooms out her lens from the two dead women in the book to take a gimlet-eyed big picture look at just why there are so many dead girls.
She hints that one reason grieving families turn to psychics for dubious ‘closure’ is because the justice system fails so often to hold perpetrators to account.
Publisher UQP describes Dead Ends as a ‘sexy, blackly comic mystery, where the impossibility of closure collides with a desire to fix the past’ and the novel is all those things.
There’s a strong narrative drive, though like many really committed noir and grunge novels, Dead Ends can get a bit wearing when almost every page serves up so much darkness, bleakness and casual cruelty with breadcrumbs of dark humour to vary the tone.
Intriguing protagonist
However the constant dark mood is probably an accurate depiction of daily life in a setting like Dead Ends. Hearteningly, Nell is no victim of the low socio-economic demographic and corrupt world she careers through with foul-mouthed defiance and naked lust. Perhaps that makes her a contemporary feminist hero of sorts.
The ‘truth’ (is there ever such a thing) about the missing loved ones Nell stumbles upon is surprising and unsurprising.
Flips the noir genre
The book keeps flipping the classic detective fiction genre where a surprising guilty party is nabbed, always with a complex reason to semi-justify murder. The killers and their enablers in Dead Ends fall more into Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ concept where evil-doers act according to their privilege and entitlement or to align themselves with privilege and power.
In this way, the author handles her topic of ‘decades of dead girls’ with a piercing insight into society’s continuing moral ambiguity around violence against women and girls that rings true to life.
If noir, grunge, black humour or queer contemporary fiction are your thing, or if you enjoy a new author confidently playing with a much-loved genre to give it powerful new meaning, this book should satisfy.
Dead Ends by Samantha Byres is published by UQP and retails for $34.99
Author Samantha-Byres IMAGE: Shannon Sexton
