Oct 19, 2026 · 31 min · 9 segments
Nathaniel Rich is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a frequent contributor to The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books. A 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches at…
Terrence McCauleyHostAnd that was, you know, Robert Ryan's also one of those noir actors that fans of the genre know about, but people who aren't might know him as a heavy and other things, but he was such a fantastic actor.
Yeah, I mean, I came, I should say, I mean, I came out of essentially film noir.
It's not even listed on my, you know, on my book jackets anymore, but it was It's called San Francisco Noir, and it's a little kind of eccentric guidebook of about film noir in San Francisco told through places that appeared in those films.
This street is where there was a car chase and bullet, you know, that kind of thing.
So I spent, in preparation for writing that book in my early 20s, I spent basically two years watching two noirs every day.
And so every I feel like on some level, everything I write is a kind of noir plot, including, by the way, my journalism I do, even when I'm writing about, you know, I write a lot about environmental issues.
It's usually in the in a context, at least internally for me as a, you know, environmental issues as crime as a crime story.
But yeah, the, the heist novel has some, the heist plot has some similarities with noir, particularly when you get into the kind of disaster plot where it's like one bad choice leads to the next bad choice.
And then they try to double or nothing and they keep losing it on double or nothing bets.
But it's, And the tone is obviously pretty different because there's like a fun and a kind of screwball characteristic of, I think, a good heist novel that you don't tend to see.
I mean, with some exceptions, but you don't tend to see that in noir, which tends to be played for as a kind of tragedy and a psychological unraveling.
And that was, you know, Robert Ryan's also one of those noir actors that fans of the genre know about, but people who aren't might know him as a heavy and other things, but he was such a fantastic actor.
Yeah, I mean, I came, I should say, I mean, I came out of essentially film noir.
It's not even listed on my, you know, on my book jackets anymore, but it was It's called San Francisco Noir, and it's a little kind of eccentric guidebook of about film noir in San Francisco told through places that appeared in those films.
This street is where there was a car chase and bullet, you know, that kind of thing.
So I spent, in preparation for writing that book in my early 20s, I spent basically two years watching two noirs every day.
And so every I feel like on some level, everything I write is a kind of noir plot, including, by the way, my journalism I do, even when I'm writing about, you know, I write a lot about environmental issues.
It's usually in the in a context, at least internally for me as a, you know, environmental issues as crime as a crime story.
But yeah, the, the heist novel has some, the heist plot has some similarities with noir, particularly when you get into the kind of disaster plot where it's like one bad choice leads to the next bad choice.
And then they try to double or nothing and they keep losing it on double or nothing bets.
But it's, And the tone is obviously pretty different because there's like a fun and a kind of screwball characteristic of, I think, a good heist novel that you don't tend to see.
I mean, with some exceptions, but you don't tend to see that in noir, which tends to be played for as a kind of tragedy and a psychological unraveling.
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