What Is Noir? And What Isn't? And Why Is A BOAT OFF THE COAST a Great Forgotten Noir Novel?

The 1987 novel by Stephen Dobyns, who died this month, is criminally overdue for a critical reexamination. As is the growing apathy surrounding the definition of noir.

I’ll own it: I’m a purist when it comes to defining noir. To me, noir is not about style, it’s about theme. It’s not about snappy cynical patter or hardboiled prose. It’s not about hats and cigarettes and sinister clouds of cigarette smoke as seen through backlit Venetian blinds. Those things can exist in noir, but they’re the garnish, not the meal; the affectations, not the substance.

It can get easy to get confused about these things, and worse, there are people of prominence in the crime-fiction community who choose to promote the confusion as more feature than bug. The editors of the genre-promotional site Crimereads have said it flat-out more than once of noir: “It’s just sort of a feeling, don’t you think?” To me, that’s a bit defeatist and even nihilistic: Everything means whatever you want it to mean, therefore nothing means anything.

Maybe that in itself is a definition of noir, or at least of how noir characters see the world when they choose not to see themselves clearly in it. Or maybe it’s just lazy. There’s something in “just sort of a feeling, don’t you think” that makes it sound as if the question of what is noir and what isn’t is too unworthy of anyone’s time and energy to discuss. And I just can’t accept that. To me noir is special, and distinct, rich in history, a spotlight through the shadows on a doomed subspecies of humanity, and deserves the effort it takes to install some guardrails around it to protect it from the kind of dilution that will render the term meaningless.

I’m just one person of no particular authority, but to me, it’s about … well, there are many great definitions. One favorite, from crime-fiction critic Rick Ollerman, is brutally succinct: “A noir story is one where the protagonist starts out screwed—and ends up screwder.” I like this conventional definition for its simplicity: A main character ends up worse than where they began in the story. And I’ll cite another that applies especially well to the book I’m going to be discussing here. It comes from Dennis Lehane, who knows a thing or fifty about noir: “Noir is a genre of loss, of men and women unable to roll with the changing times, so the changing times instead roll over them.”

A Boat Off the Coast features three main characters who fit Lehane’s definition.

Brian Davis is a good guy who’s slowly finding out that being a good guy isn’t getting him anywhere good: he’s the foreman of a chicken processing plant who often works night pickup shifts. Then gets maybe four hours of sleep before getting out on his lobster boat to haul traps off the Maine coast. For all that, the husband and father of two barely keeps pace with rent and other living expenses, and his dream of owning a home seems perpetually out of reach.

Lowell Perry works on the docks, fancies himself a classy ladies’ man even though he has no awareness that he’s anything but, and dreams of owning the latest Corvette. He’s a backslapper, a gladhander, an information trader, someone who makes it his business to know what’s going on even when he has no business knowing it, and his sideline is selling that information to federal Customs officials eager to put a stop to the smuggling that runs rampant on and off the merchant ships he services. He is transactional to his core.

Tucker Morgan, onetime high school football hero, is a Vietnam vet who hasn’t been able to find his way since leaving the military, churning through a couple of careers and a marriage before bottoming out back in his hometown as a laborer for hire: hanging Sheetrock here, bartending there, cutting pulpwood, selling a little cocaine; anything to keep him in beer and gas money. Even as he’s running out of room to pretend he’s going anywhere but nowhere. As he puts it, trying to explain the void he’s lived in between Vietnam and the present: “I mean, you grow up and play pretty fair and think you’re a pretty good kid and you hate the bullies and the cheats. Then you go someplace and suddenly you’re the bully and the cheat.” He adds: “It’s as if there’s a space between what I thought it’d be like and what it was really like. And right now it feels as if I’m stuck in that space.”

All three are losers, and all three would insist they’re not.

So imagine how each of them reacts when an opportunity to make some “real money” comes along, in the form of a shipment of cocaine from Brazil on a salt boat scheduled to come into the local Maine seaport. Someone needs to go out in a boat late at night, meet the ship at sea, and make a risky transfer — then bring it back and transport it downstate to the next person in the cocaine food chain.

Easy, right? Impossible to fuck up? Right … er, wrong.

Now, true to the best definitions of noir, none of the three think of themselves as bad guys, though they’re not averse to a bit of breaking bad on occasion.

Brian is a hardworking family man, well-liked and even respected, but when he comes across a bale of marijuana floating in the water one morning while out on his lobster boat, he doesn’t turn it in — he hands it off to his lifelong buddy Lowell. Lowell works his connections and returns with $5,000 for Brian. As Brian tells Tucker: “Bills got paid and we bought a new TV. Then we all went to the dentist.” He’d rather not cultivate the stress that comes with selling drugs, but he is desperate to scale back on poor-paying, backbreaking work and maybe get just a little bit ahead for a change. Later, when Tucker works on him about using his boat for the midnight coke rendezvous, he skillfully manipulates his old friend — and detests himself for doing it — but finally breaks Brian down to the point that he makes Brian say the words: “I need the money!” over and over.

Tucker doesn’t want to deal with drugs, either, but he knows that it’s the best way of making money that doesn’t involve backbreaking day labor. In fact, he sold a bit of coke fronted to him by an old Vietnam friend, but “Tucker hadn’t liked it. He didn’t trust the people he sold it to, even though they were mostly locals, and he didn’t like the attention it brought him: strange men showing up at his house at three or four in the morning to see if they could score. And Sarah had hated it. Really it had been at that point that she began to talk of moving out.” But he’s desperate enough that he returns to his Vietnam friend and asks for a pound of coke. The friend won’t do that, but he’s in business with the guys who need a guy with a boat, and says that if Tucker can make that happen, there’s big money in it for him.

And Lowell? It was because he alerted the Customs people to the coke being smuggled into the port that the drug runners are shifting to the alternate at-sea pickup arrangement. And because he wants to keep his Customs cash rewards coming for his tips, he makes it his business to find out about the new plan. Also, Lowell hates Tucker, going back to grade school, and is hot for Cindy, Brian’s teenaged sister-in-law, who is hot for Tucker, who renews his old friendship with Brian in part because he needs Brian’s lobster boat for the coke pickup. So Lowell is everywhere, following Tucker, badmouthing Tucker to Brian, hitting on Cindy whenever he sees her, trying to thread various human needles until he can stitch together the fabric of his greedy materialistic desires.

It’s here that Tucker, the catalyst for all the mayhem to come, emerges as the central figure of A Boat Off the Coast, the one who makes everyone around him act in response to his impulses. He is a true classic noir type: He’s depressed, he’s misanthropic, he’s churlish and cynical, but he’s also able and willing to do what he feels he has to, thanks to skills acquired as a LURP — Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol — standout in Vietnam. And, like the classic noir type, his humanity can’t help but shine a little through the black clouds that seem to be constantly above his head. While he tries hard to project hardness and indifference, what other people see is an appealing wounded vulnerability that makes others want to help him even when he doesn’t want the help but it interferes with what one friend calls his “loner status.”

Phillip, Tucker’s Vietnam friend, takes stock of Tucker while the two have dinner: “Much of Tucker was display: the way he dressed and spoke and moved his arms and heaved himself around in his chair, as if he was constantly saying fuck you and didn’t care who knew it. Phillip guessed this particular display was far more important to Tucker than love or money or good times. Once again, he wondered if it was smart to include Tucker in his plans. But he wanted to help Tucker, help him out of this mess he’s in.’ Cindy, too, at seventeen sees him with clear adult eyes through the haze of animal attraction to the mysterious and dangerous side of him: “She felt tender toward Tucker and wished she could wrap him up in her arms. At the same time she was frightened of him, not that he would hurt her of course, but that he wasn’t entirely in control, like taking a bike down the hill with no brakes. You knew it was going to crash but you just didn’t know where.”

More I will not say about the plot of A Boat Off the Coast, or what happens to the main characters, other than to point out that they each indeed end up worse off than when they started. But each winds up catching little breaks, moments of received or bestowed or accidental grace, and while they’re definitely down by the final page it’s a stretch to say they’re definitively out. There’s a future for each if they can engage some heretofore hidden gear within themselves to get there. Maybe they can. And maybe they can’t. That question is left to the reader, as it should be.

So, you might ask, why isn’t A Boat Off the Coast considered canonical contemporary noir, or even remembered? Good question. My research shows that the novel was not given much of a push by its publisher, which may have been wary of this new direction from Dobyns, who was just settling into a 1980s heyday that saw him alternate books of poetry with his private-eye novels, with occasional standalones that bore little similarity to one another beyond Dobyns’ distinctively dry, scholarly, semi-amused voice.

A Los Angeles Times reviewer couldn’t get past his dislike of Tucker Morgan to say anything positive about the book, but a Washington Post critic found it worthwhile despite being disconcerted by Dobyns’ swerve from conventional mystery into corrosive noir:

If the Hardy Boys were to contemplate one of their cases through a cloud of pot smoke, they could cause no more shock to their fans than will shake faithful readers of Stephen Dobyns’ Saratoga-based detective stories when they dip into his newest work, A Boat off the Coast.

Followers of Charlie Bradshaw, Dobyns’ spa private eye, know him to be a kind and decent man whose moral code would fit snugly over the body of a bishop, and when told that the coast off which the boat lurks is that of Maine, Dobyns devotees will expect some homely philosophy and a nice clean murder with a minimum of blood.

What they get is a cast of characters as seedy as any since the curtain rose on Gogol’s ‘Lower Depths’ and a rattle of violent action fueled by the drive to earn big money with cocaine.

Under all the gut-punching, however, there are character examinations that give us an interest in the protagonists far beyond the simple concerns about who will make the delivery and get the money.

I think A Boat Off the Coast is like a rock album that stands the test of time but was not what anyone was expecting from the band at the time, and so fans and critics alike punished it for not meeting their expectations at the time of what a Stephen Dobyns novel should be. But, freed from that context, the novel should be assessed — reassessed — on its own considerable merits.

I’m a big admirer of Stephen Dobyns, though I’m guessing he’s neither the first or even hundred and first name you might think of when you think of a “noir author,” nor was he the type to habituate the hotel bar at a Bouchercon-type conclave and thus gain the slavish admiration of the social-media class.

First, because he’s primarily thought of as a poet (fourteen published volumes of verse since 1972). Second, because his fiction worked in many idioms. His first published novel, A Man of Little Evils (1973), was a John LeCarre-like spy novel set in England. And soon after he wrote the first of eleven non-noirish private-detective novels set in Saratoga Springs, New York and starring the hangdog, sad-sack Charlie Bradshaw. The rest of his novels, while all having elements of crime, defy easy categorization beyond “literary,” and his latter-day efforts had something of a madcap comic bent, as witnessed by his last, Is Fat Bob Dead Yet?

Some of his crime novels are noir-inflected, but only A Boat Off the Coast has the bullet that hits the noir bone.

(In researching Stephen Dobyns for this piece, I was startled to see that he had died on June 14, 2026, at age 85. Startled because, as I write this, it’s June 22, and so far I see no obituary for him in The New York Times, even though in my mind at least he’s more than cleared the Times threshold for inclusion on the basis of tribal fame, accomplishment and cultural impact. But, of course, that’s what a fan would say, right?)

This is the first in an occasional series on defining noir and celebrating the all-but-forgotten titles from the last fifty-plus years that embody the definitions that fit noir best, as I see it. Feel free to suggest titles for me to read, enjoy, and write about. Thanks for reading.