HORACE McCoy’s novella, ‘They Shoot Horses Don’t They’, first published in 1935, reprinted numerous times, then filmed in the 1970s, and certainly one of Jane Fonda’s best films, is written in terse, short, scenic chapters adding up to just over one hundred pages. The novella ends at a coolly effective point where the narrator, a young aspiring film director in Hollywood, answers the detective who questions him why he shot his girlfriend: “They shoot horses, don’t they?”
McCoy’s purely demonstrative writing style, however, shows us how his narrator arrived at such an absurd violent decision to obey his nihilistic girlfriend’s death wish, by describing remembered scenes in the narrator’s mind, when, as a child, he experienced the delayed subconscious trauma of seeing his beloved horse mercy-killed by his grandfather after it had broken its leg.
McCoy’s frank and laconic imagistic and structural writing leaves the reader gripped in after-thought at the novel’s end, and this is its cinematic style and originality, which is also brilliant as content, since it exposes the possible psychological illness behind the narrator’s criminal act.
On the other hand, Vera Caspary’s profoundly enjoyable and innovatively written novel, ‘Laura’, is another literary milestone, first published by Houghton-Mifflin in 1941, and beautifully filmed by Otto Preminger in 1944 in a lusciously artistic Film Noir style. There is no mistaking this novel’s stylistic newness, because it is written by three different first-person narrators: An effete obsessive gossip columnist, a suave highly intelligent detective, and Laura, a popular New York model, thought to have been murdered. A fourth section of this exceptional novel for 1941, is the stenographic report of the detective’s conversation with a prime suspect and his lawyer.
Caspary’s literary style in ‘Laura’ was extensively expanded and developed in the Canadian novelist, Margaret Atwood’s hilariously insightful 1980s novel, ‘Life Before Man’. In 1941, Steve Fisher’s brilliantly stylish first-person novel, ‘I Wake up Screaming’ was published, and in 1942 filmed, starring Victor Mature in what is regarded as one of the greatest classics of the Film Noir style.
Fisher’s novel is a delicious nonstop rollercoaster ride of new writing as visual imagery. Set in Hollywood during its hectic era of the 1940s, its narrator is a sporty Hollywood scriptwriter who becomes the victim of scheming jealousy over the affections of a beautiful actress. The entire novel is already like watching a film, with tropical atmosphere, chic fashion, and professional success.
It begins: “It was a hot Saturday night and I had on my Sy Devore suit and a hand-knit tie and sat at the bar in Mike Romanoff’s, drinking Canadian Club Old Fashioneds. The bar stools were leather and the wall decorations had that ultra look, and Zsa Zsa Gabor was at a close-by table, her head thrown back in laughter.”
But one of the most stylishly original masters of American new visual writing was Raymond Chandler. We need not repeat the names of the famous films his novels have led to; those interested can check that out for themselves. Significantly again, Hollywood and the cinematic profession feature prominently in his LA-based novels, especially in ‘The Little Sister’, first published in 1949 by Houghton-Mifflin. It was from Chandler (and Dashiel Hammett) that we get the precise, figuratively colourful step-by-step scenes of mobile visual imagery in sentences. Like this one from ‘The Little Sister’:
“Malibu. More movie stars. More pink and blue bath tubs. More tufted beds. More Chanel No. 5. More Lincoln Continentals and Cadillacs. More wind- blown hair and sunglasses and attitudes and pseudo-refined voices and waterfront morals. Now wait a minute. Lots of nice people work in pictures. You’ve got the wrong attitude, Marlowe. You’re not human tonight.”
Chandler’s new writing, like all these other innovative American writers of the ‘hard-boiled’ style, was already a movie on the page. Unfortunately, American literary criticism, except for critics like Bruce Morrissette in the late 20th Century, never equated the common popularity of ‘hard-boiled’ American suspense fiction with a new, vital and original achieved style of non-categorical literary fiction.
It was mid-20th Century French writers who saw the advanced use of visual imagery in these ‘pulp-fiction’ American writers, and it led to the unique stylistically perceptive development of the Nouveau Roman, or New Novel.
There is little doubt that the French  philosophical exploration into linguistics and psychology,  begun since the 17th and 18th Centuries with the writings of Descartes, the Abbe de Condillac, and later Saussure and Freud — aided of course by the writings of German philosophers like Hegel and Neitzche — encouraged the  necessary mental discipline which led outstanding 20th Century French creative writers of the Nouveau Roman or New Novel, beginning with Andre Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, then more definitively with Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras, Claude Mauriac and Phillippe Sollers, to correctly see the potential for advanced new writing as visual imagery.
The American writers of the ‘hard-boiled’ style provided the first examples for this advancement, but so did other outstanding American creative writers like Hemingway, Faulkner, John Dos Passos and Erskine Caldwell, who were literary mainstream writers not of the mystery/suspense/crime novel tradition.
Something specific existed in these American writers which could not be found before in European writers, whether Anglo or continental, or other emerging writers in developing nations around the world. That something was also somewhat distinct from the style and content of those great innovative European creative writers, like Flaubert, Zola, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, or Kafka.
What exactly is this specific American literary quality which went through a metamorphosis in the hands of at least a half dozen of France’s 20th Century creative writers, and blossomed into a vivid new viewpoint and precise exercise of writing as visual imagery?
The root of this unique American linguistic difference lay in the shift, or human change, that had occurred through the colonization and immigration of Europeans to America, also by Africans and all others who followed as well. The experience of a less developed, less genteel, more untamed landscape than Europe’s, nascent American urban industrialisation , and the intermingling of different races, cultures, classes, individuals, and languages; in short, the multi-cultural matrix from which American culture emerged. An incredibly rich Anglo-American linguistic diction was created by this matrix. Think of the précised early figurative speech patterns of Native American English, the earthy Anglo slang of Afro-American slaves, and later the slick descriptive phrasing of black Jazz musicians and hipsters, the lyrical poetry of the Irish tongue, the exaggerated biblical  metaphors in Southern speech, etc. All these and other influences came to define a fresh style of English possessed by all Americans, and emerged in the novels, stories, and poems, and even essays of numerous outstanding creative writers, some of whom are mentioned here.
However, their influence felt by 20th Century French novelists in particular, has nothing to do with imitation of oral American speech, but rather seeing where the linguistic tone and structural arrangements of certain creative writers have added to a general reservoir of knowledge about language in general, and how this knowledge can be used by any contemporary creative writer to help literature achieve further comprehensive benefits for human beings on the whole.