Sometimes the characters and settings of a novel are so perfect that the author pretty much can’t go wrong with the story. Tell me that you’ve got a 1940 work of noir fiction set around a North Carolina roadhouse and that features characters with names like Smut Milligan, Catfish Wall, and Badeye Honeycutt. Add that moonshining, card and dice games, love triangles, bare knuckles brawling, and such figure in regularly. Mention that the book was written by an enigmatic guy who only authored the one novel and that it has been praised by the likes of Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Chandler, and George V. Higgins. And okay, okay, go ahead and ring me up, cause you had me sold just with the roadhouse, Smut, Catfish, and Badeye.

The book we’re talking about is They Don’t Dance Much by James Ross, and it just about defines “lost classic of noir” (although it’s about to be found again, via a new reprint with an intro by Daniel Woodrell).

The downbeat and gritty story is set in the area of Corinth, North Carolina, (not terribly far from Durham) and told in a fittingly deadpan tone, by a guy named Jack McDonald. Jack is a down-on-his-luck farmer whose crops have failed him to the point where he can’t keep up payments on his land (he can’t even pony up what he owes for his mother’s funeral from three years back). Jack has to give in and sell his farm and all its trimmings, just to keep the bill collectors off his back. But he’s spared the indignity of going on relief when he’s offered gainful employment by Smut Milligan. Before we get into the nature of that work, here’s a little background on Smut, by way of Jack:

[Bring on the background...]

Brothers shouldn’t get involved with the same woman. There could be a whole subgenre or books/movies in which this scenario is involved, and I feel confident stating that tragedy would be a common theme.

Bob Crane (no, not that Bob Crane), narrator of Hill Girl—Charles Williams’s excellent work of farmyard pulp from 1951—never had any intention of getting mixed up with one of his promiscuous brother’s victims of love. And he certainly didn’t mean for that to happen with a girl on whom his bro—generally a love ’em and leave ’em type—is actually stuck. But it just happened.

Bob, 22, returns to his family’s Texas farm and estate, after being away at college for a few years (during which time he got more involved in an ill-fated attempt at a boxing career than he did achieving scholarly distinction). He is back to take over the farm, which was left to him by his deceased grandfather, to whom he was always close. It’s a good thing for Bob that he got along with his granddad, because his late father, “The Major,” a stubborn man who was forever butting heads with his youngest son, left this to Bob in his own will: one penny. Bob is built like a defensive lineman and has a face that makes girls run the other way. He’s got his dad’s hardheadedness, as well as his strong set of ethics and of responsibility.

[The bigger they are, the harder they fall...]

In a recent installment of this series, I wrote that noir novels often revolve around one doomed character, and I described some of the different types of misfortunate protagonists. A sub-type of lead character in these books (and movies of the kind, for that matter) is the person who once seemed to have everything going for him or her, but who has hit rock bottom.

Ralph Cotter, the narrator and main character of Horace McCoy’s noir gem Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1948), is such a guy. A former Phi Beta Kappa scholar with blue blood in his veins, Cotter is now a hoodlum. Something else I wrote in that other piece is that we readers tend to cheer for the ill-fated characters in noir novels, even if we know they’re really no damn good. But Cotter is one guy who would challenge Mother Teresa to feel any compassion for him. He is an amoral man who feels no loyalty to anyone.

In the book’s first chapter, in which Cotter is breaking out of a prison farm, he shoots and kills his partner and lets everyone believe the cops got the guy—and the man happens to be the brother of Cotter’s girlfriend on the outside, who happens to be the person who orchestrated Cotter’s illegal release from the hell of the prison. As a free man, Cotter shows himself to be no more loyal to the girl than he was to her brother, and the same goes for anyone else he gets mixed up with—Cotter with his nihilistic, self-centered perspective doesn’t have a care for any of them, except the consideration of how they might help him along.

[A real swell guy...]

Sometimes a great story can be told when there’s not much of a story to tell. That sounds wrong, I know, but think about Jim Jarmusch’s 1984 art house classic film Stranger Than Paradise. That movie is mainly about two lovable losers, Willie and Eddie, whose idea of Saturday night fun is sitting around Willie’s crummy New York City efficiency apartment, not talking to each other while swilling cans of cheap beer and watching the paint crack off the walls.

Okay, okay, some things do happen to those jokers in the tale—Willie’s Screamin’ Jay Hawkins-obsessed cousin from Budapest comes for a visit, Willie and Eddie win some loot in a crooked card game, Willie and Eddie later go to Cleveland and Florida...but, come on, we’re not talking about thrilling lives here. Yet that movie is brilliant, and utterly compelling. It’s the atmosphere, stupid. And showing people as they really are.

The Blonde on the Street Corner, David Goodis’s underground classic of noir fiction, has this same duality of being both punishingly humdrum yet completely engaging.

[It puts a spell on you...]

Some of the best works of noir, in both fiction and film, revolve around one troubled character. These doomed protagonists are often people who just can’t get along in the world, either forever or during one nightmarish, downward-spiraling cycle of events. Sometimes they’re basically good people who just ran into a nasty wave of bad fortune, sometimes they’re neither especially good nor bad but are just at odds with the rest of the world, and sometimes they’re rotten people that we vote for anyway because we know it’s the rotten world that made them that way.

Fires that Destroy, Harry Whittington’s superb pulp novel from 1951, is no exception to the above-stated rule. But what’s unusual about it, for its time, is that the distressed lead character is a woman. Bernice Harper is plagued in such a way that she belongs in the second of the three classes described in the previous paragraph—neither good nor bad by nature, but just not getting along in life. Bernice is a 24-year old secretarial worker living in New York City. An embittered Plain Jane, she is frustrated by the fact that other women in her company get promoted over her, not because they do better work than she does, but because their faces are prettier than hers, their bodies more voluptuous.

[She’s not just another pretty face...]

I hesitated to write about a Ross Macdonald title for this series, for two reasons. For one, he’s so well known in crime fiction circles that it’s hard to think of any of his titles as being “lost.” For another, while Macdonald authored some of the finest suspense novels ever committed to the page, mostly with his Lew Archer series, generally speaking his writing is sophisticated to an extent that separates it from the kind of bare knuckles stuff that we think of as noir fiction.

But I’m going ahead with this piece on Blue City because, for one, it is an early, pre-Archer title by Macdonald that is more underappreciated than his other works. And, two, unlike the Archer books, this story is lean and mean in a way that makes it more like a Jim Thompson title than it does Macdonald’s own usual type of novel.

And I’m writing about Blue City for a third reason: it’s just a hell of a read.

[Those are three excellent reasons...]

So many people have been cited as influences on the films of Quentin Tarantino that it’s laughable. I might as well say my 21-month-old daughter influenced Reservoir Dogs. But if there’s one crime fiction writer who could rightly make the claim (were he still living), that would be George V. Higgins.

Think about the famous scenes in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction in which hard boys make small talk about quarter pounders and whether or not wait people should be tipped, in the midst of planning crimes. Imagine those scenes as being written out in the pages of a gritty crime novel set in Boston in the 1970s, and you start to get the feel of what Higgins’s best work is like.

Talking is mostly what happens in Higgins’s novels. He was a big believer in using dialogue as a way of telling a story. If the reader isn’t willing to sit there and intently listen to the discussions between the characters, and sometimes read between the lines in the talks, the reader is not going to be able to follow the story. In The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Higgins’s first published novel, from 1972, chitchat between seedy characters makes up something like 85 percent of the book’s content. Eddie Coyle is still the title for which Higgins is most known. It’s been championed by the likes of Ross MacDonald, Elmore Leonard, and Dennis Lehane, and it was made into the classic film noir of the same title, with Robert Mitchum in the lead role. But while some seem to want to think of Higgins as a one-hit wonder, he actually penned several more stone classics of hard-hitting noir fiction. The best of the others might very well be Eddie Coyle’s follow-up, 1973’s The Digger’s Game.

[He hits...and hits again...]

Carnival culture is fertile ground for storytelling, whether we’re talking about books or movies. Jack O’Connell’s excellent 2008 novel The Resurrectionist (which focuses on the freak show element of a carny) comes immediately to mind, as does the movie Gun Crazy (the original one, from 1950, which is an all-time top 10 film noir in this joker’s opinion). Another prime example of carny life turned into a story is Robert Edmond Alter’s 1966 novel Carny Kill, which is both a gripping read and a classic of the noir fiction genre.

I don’t know much about Alter, but the author info on him that’s included in the edition of Carny Kill that I have (Black Lizard reprint from ’86) says that he died, at age 40, the same year this book was first published by Fawcett. Alter, who had short stories featured in high-profile literary magazines, wrote 17 novels and 14 of them were kids’ books. Carny Kill proves that, although he seemed to favor children’s literature when writing full-length works of fiction, he had a masterly hand when penning adult stories.

The story here revolves around a character named Thax (short for Thaxton—odd name, I know, but he prefers it to his actual first name of Leslie): a well-read underachiever who goes around quoting Remarque and Saint-Exupery and referencing scenes from classic movies, but who, at 32, is down-and-out. When Thax, who has worked for carnies in the past, wanders on to a show in a Florida town, he takes a job with it, working the shell game stand.

[Hey, a guy’s gotta make a living...]

“With admiration, for Dan J. Marlowe, author of The Name of the Game is Death: Hardest of the hardboiled.”

This unexpected shout out comes from Stephen King, in the pages of his Hard Case Crime novel The Colorado Kid.

I have to echo King’s sentiments. The Name of the Game is Death is indeed hard-boiled heaven. It features an antihero you root for even though you know he’d take your head off if you got in his way, some purely evil characters whose heads you hope the antihero will take off, other, more likable people, raw sex, retribution, suspense...

Originally published in 1962 as a Fawcett Gold Medal title, reprinted by Black Lizard in ’88 and due to be brought back out (as a 2-for-1, with another Dan J. Marlowe title) by Stark House Press this year, TNOTGID is a bank heist story, a road novel, a revenge tale, and much more. It starts in Phoenix, where a three-man team of crooks pulls a bank job. One of them is killed in the getaway attempt, one flees to a small town in Florida with most of the take, and the other—the main character and narrator—roams for a while. It’s when the roaming guy (much more on him shortly) realizes that something has gone awry with his partner at his hideaway in Florida, that the real action starts. The narrator travels to that town, and insinuates himself in the local culture there, as a means of finding out what has happened to his partner (and their stash of money).

[Follow the money...good advice!]

Lots of people know about the landmark 1971 British gangland film Get Carter (and if you’re a crime fiction/film enthusiast who doesn’t: stop here, go watch it, then come back and read this later). But too few have been hipped to Ted Lewis, the author of the novel that served as that movie’s basis. Lewis was a noir maverick, the originator of the British school of hardboiled crime fiction. He is the U.K.’s answer to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. David Peace is just one of the legion of contemporary Brit Grit authors who cite him as an influence. He was also a fascinating, if ultimately tragic, guy: a multi-talented man gifted with artistic genius, and a good-looking bloke with the ability to be a great charmer; but also someone with a dark side, who was limited by a debilitating addiction to alcohol.

Like Jack Carter, the mob enforcer who is the lead character of Get Carter (Jack’s Return Home is the original name of Lewis’s 1970 novel), Lewis came from the North of England and lived in London as an adult. Growing up in the small town of Barton-Upon-Humber, Lewis showed himself to have an artistic bent from his earliest years. A lifelong visual artist, Lewis was rarely found without his sketchpad through his boyhood years. His cousin Alf remembers a time when their families were together at one of their homes and nobody could find Ted (Edward then). Alf finally discovered his cousin up in an attic, watching a hard rain come down, and intently drawing in his omnipresent pad. Alf asked Edward what he was doing, and got the matter-of-fact response, “Drawing the storm.” The case can be made that drawing the storm is precisely what Lewis the author was up to when writing novels as an adult. Prodded on by an influential grammar school teacher who was a published author, a teenaged Lewis wrote some short stories for the school’s annual magazine; the stories are stunningly good, and surprisingly intense, to have come off the pen of someone that age. Lewis was also a musician who mostly played jazz piano.

[A man of many talents]