Noir has always been a genre of losers: hopeless, flawed, fatalist characters driven by their darker desires to an unhappy end. Often misunderstood as the “Hard-boiled Detective” genre, Noir’s roots reach back to the 40s and Post-war America. Whereas the Hard-boiled narrative features an investigator with a moral center, Noir focuses on the maladjustment of the American G.I., providing an alternative voice to the optimism that was permeating the cultural ethos of the 50s.
After World War II, the United States and the Allied Powers wrote The Book on fascism and the atrocities of the Axis Powers. Yet, there was a hidden, unspoken cost of World War II that reached far beyond the battlefield and into suburban homes: a dark shadow underneath the rosy decadence of the 50s.
My own maternal grandfather, a bosun on LST-507, was living proof of this. Just after 0200 on April 28th, 1944, German E-boats attacked a convoy of Allied ships in Lyme Bay conducting a practice for D-Day, codenamed “Exercise Tiger.” LST-507 was the first boat hit and the only boat to go up in flames. Its fuel reserves burst and the resulting oil slick quickly ignited. Men burned in the water, some of them flipped upside down and drowned, their life vests turned inside out—a practical joke the sailors played on each other during evacuation drills.
My grandfather dove into the bay; huddled with the survivors in the dark, freezing water, knowing no rescue would come, as the standing orders were to abandon any survivors. The flames closed in. The screams of burning men split the night.
As dawn broke, a British destroyer fired on the bow of LST-507, sending it into the depths of Lyme Bay. It was, I imagine, the darkest moment of my grandfather’s young life.
Fortunately, Lieutenant John Doyle of LST-515 disobeyed orders and circled back to attempt a rescue. My grandfather clambered aboard after being in the water for nearly eight hours. He was assigned a spare bunk and given new clothes. While they sailed towards the harbor, he became seasick and headed up to the deck. The helmsman botched the docking and LST-515 crashed into the pier, which punctured the crew’s quarters, which obliterated my grandfather’s bunk.
So you can thank Lieutenant John Doyle and seasickness for this issue of Flash Fiction Online.
The survivors of Exercise Tiger were sworn to secrecy. Some of them, like my grandfather, were discharged. He returned to an optimistic America with P.T.S.D and he would carry it, unaddressed, until he died in 1998, with the spectre of World War II still haunting him and then his descendants through generational trauma.
This story, unfortunately, is not unique.
In this issue of Flash Fiction Online, I wanted to feature the dissonance my grandfather must have felt upon his return to America: incredible prosperity contrasted with that part of him still struggling alone in the dark, burning water of Lyme Bay. I also wanted to drag the tired, alcohol-soaked, womanizing corpse of the 1950s investigator into the 21st century and marry it to the Paranormal and Sci-Fi genres. Urban Fantasy and Cyberpunk, popular in the early aughts, certainly engaged with the investigator trope, but I wanted to push writers to combine them into something different. Something, hopefully, new.
“A Face Slipped Off Its Skull” by Ashlee Lhamon leads off the issue with broken noses and bloodstains on white marble.
Sit with the dead in Emma Burnett’s “Really and Truly Dead.” Hopefully none of them wake. Hopefully the stake on your belt stays there, unused.
“下楼 – Next Floor” by Crystal Leung harkens back to Hitchcock’s Vertigo. You slowly descend into the circular depths of an apartment building and the mind — or is it Hell?
What’s a little pain in the face of redemption? Find out in “They’ve Got Your Number” by Aeryn Rudel.
You’ll love the take on the investigator trope in “You/We/Us” by Beth Goder, as well the pairing with a first contact, far-future Sci-Fi aesthetic.
“In the Garden of Death” by Chris Clemens marries gorgeous, surrealist language with the Noir trope of the “loser in a fatalist situation.”
“The Shit Thing About Being a Werewolf on the Moon” by Eliza Pry explores a character trapped outside her natural habitat, doomed to prowl sterile hallways instead of the lonely woods.
Finally, “right here, on this spot” by Parker O’Neill closes out the issue, but you won’t find closure here. Maybe in 2030, or 2036, or 2043, or 2050, though, maybe—. Or maybe all you’ll find is the twisted wreck of LST-507, rusting in the sucking mud deep in Lyme Bay while the world races toward another large-scale conflict and the ghosts of the men who died there scream impotent warnings from beyond the grave.
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Ⓒ Jacob Baugher