NOIR WEEK

This is NOIR WEEK, when I’ll be posting a daily piece written in the style of that genre.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines "Noir" as ‘crime fiction featuring hard-boiled, cynical characters in bleak, sleazy settings’ and other sources refer to it variously as being typified by its cynicism, fatalism and moral ambiguity.
Fellow writers will be familiar with the phenomenon known as "Writer's Block" when for various reasons it becomes impossible to construct a coherent sentence, let alone compose a story or poem.
We each have a different approach to dealing with this problem and mine is to write something completely different from my usual output, in a voice other than my own.
Generally, after a brief foray into this literary "otherworld", I find myself reinvigorated, renewed and ready to write again.
I scribbled about twenty "Noirs" whilst grappling with the dreaded "Writer’s Block" and found the experience of creating a series of shady characters, enormous fun. 
I hesitate to classify these pieces as poems as perhaps they're more accurately described as rhyming vignettes.

  

THE PRIVATE EYE

I’m drinking whiskey for a cure:
hangover pounding in my head.
She sways in, high-heels, lipstick red.
Dames equals trouble, that’s for sure.

She says she wants her husband found
but pretty soon she’s found my lips.
She pants, she pouts, her grinding hips
revitalize this old bloodhound.

I never find the guy, instead
that sweet dame takes me for a sap.
I end up on a murder rap.
Dames equals trouble, like I said.