text: Noir is different. In noir, everyone is fallen, and right and wrong are not clearly defined and maybe not even attainable.Andrew Pepper, in an essay published in The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, listed the major thematic commonalities of noir fiction as “the corrosive effects of money, the meaninglessness and absurdity of existence, anxieties about masculinity and the bureaucratization of public life, a fascination with the grotesque and a flirtation with, and rejection of, Freudian psychoanalysis.”  Eddie Duggan discusses the distinction between hardboiled and noir fiction, claiming that "psychological instability is the key characteristic of the protagonists of noir writing, if not the key characteristic of the noir writers themselves".  Similarly, Johnny Temple, founder of Akashic Books, observed that noir fiction tends to be written by "authors whose life circumstances often place them in environments vulnerable to crime."
  Origins and later proponents
  Beginning with 1940's The Bride Wore Black, author Cornell Woolrich wrote a series of six unrelated noir novels with "black" in the title, three of which were adapted for film in the 1940s.  The word "noir" was used by the Paris-based publisher Gallimard in 1945 as the title for its Série Noire crime fiction imprint.  In the English-speaking world, the term originated as a cinematic one—film noir.  This term again first appeared in France, in 1946, though it did not enjoy wide use until the 1970s.  Film noir refers to cinematic works based on novels of both the hardboiled and noir traditions, exhibiting realism and postwar disillusionment as influenced by German Expressionism.