On December 1, 1941, McGrady boards a flight to take him to Hong Kong via Midway, Wake Island, and Manila, and he’s overcome by wave of apprehension. In private, the admiral recommends that McGrady proceed with “operational discretion,” an option that requires him to operate clandestinely rather than announcing his investigative interests to foreign authorities. He demands that McGrady follow the trail wherever it leads, reasoning that the former Army soldier can handle himself, having seen combat action in China supporting the Marines during the Fujian Rebellion. The admiral doesn’t accept jurisdictional excuses from the Honolulu Police Department. The only murder suspect boarded a plane headed to Hong Kong on a fake passport and has apparently tortured and gutted a Marine on Wake Island, a military outpost and refueling spot for flights to East Asia. Political pressure mounts when one of the carved-up victims is identified as the missing nephew of a Navy admiral. The police captain makes it clear that, although McGrady has lived on the island for five years since his military discharge, he’s still an outsider and hasn’t earned any trust yet. It’s his first homicide, and he’ll be working it alone. McGrady, a rookie detective, is the only one in the department who doesn’t know to make himself scarce before the long Thanksgiving holiday.Īt the station, McGrady learns that there was a brutal murder on a dairy farm on the other side of Oahu. A face that made you want to hurry up and drink.” The bartender tells him there’s a call from the Honolulu Police captain. “Before he had a taste of it, the barman was back,” Kestrel writes. We find him belly up at a seedy Honolulu bar packed with rowdy sailors on shore leave from Pearl Harbor. Though Five Decembers plays out in the Pacific Theater of World War II, its style is cemented firmly in the traditions of classic noir, from the nostalgic hand-painted pulp art cover, a hallmark of Hard Case Crime publishing, to a literal phone call to action interrupting McGrady’s first after-shift drink. If his protagonist wasn’t brooding enough before, he’s plenty hard-boiled now. I don’t know if James Kestrel, the author’s pseudonym, is a veteran, but he certainly red-lined the pressure by stranding his Five Decembers detective, Joe McGrady, in the middle of a war. While war doesn’t often play directly into their works, their trauma bleeds onto the pages, the subtext staining their characters with the regrets and the bruised values of people who were forced to do what was necessary to survive.
Barely a generation later in World War II, Graham Greene was immersed in real international intrigue in Sierra Leone, working under Kim Philby, the man who would later become one of the most notorious Russian moles in history.
In another World War I campaign, Dashiell Hammett was rushing around the battlefield aiding the wounded while serving in the Motor Ambulance Corps.
Raymond Chandler survived the “war to end all wars” in the trenches of France with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Hell, some of the most notable pioneers of the noir page and stage went through the crucible themselves. Where else are the stakes higher and the players so desperate, pushed to extremes in matters that are life or death? For all these reasons, noir should be a perfect pairing with war. IF YOU’RE LIKE ME, you’re drawn to noir for the grim settings, moral ambiguity, and a cast of characters with cynical worldviews forged from a lifetime of hard knocks - damaged goods, everyone.
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