Surf noir is a subgenre that shouldn’t exist. The contradiction at its heart is right there in its name. Start with surf – a word that recalls endless summer, gnarly waves, sun-kissed blondes (of all genders) and iconically chill dudes like Moondoggie and Jeff Spicoli of Fast Times At Ridgemont High. Now cram it together with noir, that distinctly American genre that conjures shadows, treachery, femme fatales, bitter cynics (of all genders) and iconically hard-boiled loners like Mr Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or the hapless saps that appear in the novels of Mr James M Cain. One is light; the other darkness. One is The Beach Boys; the other is Mr James Ellroy.

So, why does surf noir, as a genre, work so well? The connection, of course, is California. The noir sensibility stemmed out of the hard-boiled fiction pages of 1930s pulp magazines, “film noir” was coined in 1946 by the French critic Mr Nino Frank. But the spirit of noir was nurtured in the cradle of California, whether it’s personified by Sam Spade in San Francisco or littered about the sun-bleached Los Angeles featured in the novels of Mr Raymond Chandler.

By the turn of the 20th century, California had established itself as the new American Eden, for better or worse: a sunnily superficial place of (ultimately) empty promises and false facades where men and women went to fall headlong from grace. By the 1950s, the West Coast popularised surf culture, American-style – a subculture which, despite its baked-in sunshine and boy-band harmonies, always had a punk edge to it.

There’s a reason surf-rock, that genre of jangly instrumental guitar-pop pioneered by Mr Dick Dale and embraced much later in the films of Mr Quentin Tarantino, feels so frenetic and edgy rather than laid-back and chill. California in the late 1960s and early 1970s – post-Manson Family, post-Summer of Love, post-Altamont – was an unsettled and unsettling frontier and surf, at its roots, is a fringe culture, attracting marginal characters drawn by temperament or circumstance to embrace an alternative way of life.

Given their proximity, both geographically and aesthetically, perhaps it was inevitable that surf and noir would collide. But it took one author to set this collision in motion, and it didn’t happen until 1984. Most genres don’t have a single, definable origin text, but surf noir does: Tapping The Source, the National Book Award-nominated novel by the then 38-year-old Mr Kem Nunn, who had grown up in Pomona and was an avid surfer himself.

Tapping The Source is the tale of Ike Tucker, an 18-year-old naïf stuck in the inland empire who heads to Huntington Beach to track down his runaway sister. What he encounters, in the novel’s jacket copy, is a world full of misfits chasing “the endless parties, the ultimate highs and the perfect waves” – the bikers and burnouts who’ve washed up like driftwood on the country’s western shore.

Mr Nunn’s oceanside world of pornographers, drug addicts and, yes, surf bums would have felt right at home in Mr Chandler’s bleak 1930s LA – even as they feel like the direct descendants of the dead-eyed hippies that populate the late 1960s California chronicled by Ms Joan Didion. By the 1980s, the Californian dream had curdled further: the state had exported its movie-star-turned-governor Mr Ronald Reagan to the White House and its unofficial anthem in the national imagination had shifted from “California Girls” by The Beach Boys to “California Über Alles” by the Dead Kennedys.

Mr Nunn went on to write two more classic surf-noir novels, The Dogs Of Winter and Tijuana Straits, providing the architecture for a resilient, if ultimately underserved genre. (As befits a West Coast novelist, Mr Nunn has also been very prolific in TV, working for years on Sons Of Anarchy and co-creating the bleak and surreal surf drama John From Cincinnati with a post-Deadwood Mr David Milch.)

In bookstores, the surf noir mantle was taken up in the 1990s by the crime writer Mr Don Winslow, now best-known for drug-war epics like The Power Of The Dog and The Cartel. Mr Winslow’s novels_ The Dawn Patrol_ and The Gentleman’s Hour centre on the shaggy surfer and PI Boone Daniels, a classic knight errant, albeit one who carries a surfboard instead of a shield. Boone Daniels belongs on the same family tree as Mr Jeff Bridges’ The Dude in The Big Lebowski – a man whose eternal equanimity is less an impediment than the perfect inoculation against humanity’s darkest strains.

On the non-fiction side, there have been several notable surf memoirs, though it’s a stretch to call them noir. They do, however, illuminate the peculiar pull of surfing, with recent entries such as Mr Allen Weisbecker’s In Search Of Captain Zero and the Pulitzer-winning Barbarian Days by Mr William Finnegan topping the list.

On screen, surf noir has not fared so well. The best surf-noir movie is probably Point Break, which is very – very – loosely based on Tapping The Source. (In the film, the inland naïf Ike Tucker becomes FBI agent Johnny Utah, played by uber-dude Mr Keanu Reeves.) You could also conceivably argue for The Big Lebowski, although The Dude is much more into bowling than killer breaks, or even Mr Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, despite the fact that the film is too loopy to be considered noir and Mr Thomas Pynchon, who wrote the novel, essentially exists as a subgenre all his own.

Still, surf noir persists because, unlike other noir offshoots, such as tech noir or Nordic noir, surf noir isn’t simply the noir sensibility exported to a different circumstance. Like the best subgenres, its strength comes from the particular resilience of its recombinant DNA – the way two seemingly contradictory, but in fact complementary cultures, commingle in an exhilarating way.

At its best, surf noir is a salt-streaked lens through which to examine the promise and peril of the American Dream. It’s all about that quest to chase the promise of that next perfect swell, building just over the edge of the horizon, even as you realise that the killer wave that’s coming is just as likely to drag you under for good.