THE TOPIC of new writing as visual imagery has a special relationship to American literary and cinematic culture. The reason for this is because there is huge difference between the reality of ‘books’ and the quality of ‘writing’ within them. In this essay, it is not ‘books’ that are the ultimate topic, but a style and quality of writing which helps to preserve the value of books, specifically novels or fiction.
Obviously, there are tons of novels, or published literature, by countless writers out there who are not indispensable to creative and other literature. Some of the best American creative writers and film-makers in the first half of the 20th Century provided indispensable new examples of creative writing as visual imagery, and cinematic form as a non-verbal semiotic language.
However, in the commercial consumerism of American culture, engaging, innovative, and even quite entertaining novels and films can be far less noticed, and therefore less appreciated than quantities of other nondescript novels and films which nevertheless receive much more publication and media attention or publicity, simply out of social prejudices and trendy promotional habits.
Despite such inevitable competition in the literary marketplace, outstanding works of literature and film never vanish into oblivion, since there are enough minds of quality, both in and out of America, who may know and rediscover them. Even more important is the quality of the works themselves, which may be so unquestionably well made, memorable, and intellectually stimulating that they can speak for themselves as indelible works of art.
A specific originality in American creative writing with a distinct inherently creative visual style emerged as early as the 1930s, but inadequate literary criticism, handicapped by a literal programatic view (academic is becoming a hackneyed term) of aesthetics, categorized this writing rigidly (for sales purposes obviously) as ‘hard-boiled’ American  mystery, suspense, and crime fiction in the behaviorist mode.
Yes! The American writers of this ‘hard-boiled’ mode, laced with visual imagery, were storytellers and plot charmers whose novels and short-stories fueled the cinematic adaptations of ‘Film Noir’ in Hollywood’s outstanding classic 1940s decade.
Because the popular view and appreciation of these novels and stories written by a totally new 20th Century crop of innovative realistic American writers like Rex Stout, Horace McCoy, Steve Fisher, W.R. Burnett, Jim Thompson, John Dos Passos, James .M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett, Vera Caspary, Dorothy .B. Hughes, Cornell Woolrich (Alias: William Irish), Mickey Spillane, Marty Holland and William .P. McGivern, were based on the end-result of what they wrote as ‘content’ or ‘story’, the literary pleasure they delivered came to be felt as separate from their actual vivid, mobile, observant sentence structures, their meticulous  descriptions of human behaviour in the present tense, their obsession with time structures, and the mental aberrations of narrators and characters.
The aesthetics of their approach to literary fiction was ignored and went out the window. As a result these writers’ novels and short stories were reduced to their ‘entertaining’ narrative content alone. However, we can begin to identify this distinct, penetrating, skillfully precise prose style with the publication in 1929 of Rex Stout’s novel: ‘How Like A God’ (reprinted 1961), whose entire sixteen chapters linking memory to  present-tense behaviour vividly describe and explore the criminal state of mind of a man walking up a flight of stairs to harm his lover.
The late American critic, Bruce Morrissette in his brilliant collection of essays, ‘Novel and Film’, mentions the ridiculously backward and conventional reaction of both leading and minor American critics of that time who wrote that Stout’s use of narrative ‘you’ was too sensational, unusual, or not genuine enough, and he would have avoided this by writing his entire novel in the familiar Third-Person tense, in which it is only intermittently written. But it is precisely Stout’s structural shifts from a subjective interior monologue, using ‘you’, to the Third- Person ‘he’, which lifts his novel into the realm of effective and unique American literary fiction.
Morrrissette’s true critical understanding reminds us of the gratitude we owe to those indispensable editors in whose hands manuscripts, which might seem like an incoherent mess to other timid novice minds, became the most stylistically interesting and exciting international novels we have seen published over the last seventy-five years.
Judging literature by its style of writing and its structural arrangements allows us to see exactly what a novel or piece of short fiction has to offer, apart from its obvious story. Because literature means actual writing rather than an intention to relate stories, we are bound to make a priority of its linguistic and formal arrangements. Yet, if we classify literature into rigid, separate and inflexible categories, the possibilities of seeing where one of these categories may present original, visually interesting, and even entertaining examples of new writing with the potential to vitalize creative literature on the whole, may elude us.
It was the American suspense, mystery, or crime novel, in the hands of the writers I have mentioned above, which largely helped to define new writing as precise visual imagery, both presaging the advancement of movies and absorbing in written language the mobile physical style of the cinematic process.
Perhaps, this wonderful give-and-take occurred because these novels were mostly written at the height of Hollywood’s excellent classic period. In many cases, both the style and content of these novels reflected the movie-making world, not just professionally, but socially; and even when these novels did not involve Hollywood, their visual style led to some of the best Hollywood film adaptations.
James .M. Cain’s  slim novels come to mind : ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’ and ‘Double Indemnity’, first published by Alfred Knopf himself in the 1930s, are classic, highly moral, First-Person novels whose narrators expose their own delusions of grandeur and  led astray corrupted character.
Swiftly told in a fluent introspective and sensitive style, Cain’s cinematic writing easily led to equally brilliant movies in the ‘Film Noir’ genre. These two novels, barely over one hundred pages each, deliver a mental atmosphere that would set any great director’s imagistic imagination on fire.
It is impossible to praise Tay Garnet’s 1946 direction of ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’, or Billy Wilder’s 1944 direction of ‘Double Indemnity’ without admitting their indebtedness to the original cinematic writing style of these two Cain novels they were adapted from.