When literary laureates list their picks for great American novels, rarely are crime novels brought up in the same breath. Sure, there were plenty of bestsellers in the genre that led to more acclaimed film adaptations (Mario Puzo’s The Godfather being perhaps the most obvious), and certain authors like Jim Thompson were even lauded for…
Read this exclusive guest post from Max Allan Collins, author of Better Dead, comparing his own Nate Heller series to finishing Mickey Spillane's posthumous Mike Hammer manuscripts, and then make sure you're signed in and comment for a chance to win a copy of his newest Nate Heller thriller! I have been writing about my fictional P.I.…
The Art of Robert E. McGinnis by Robert E. McGinnis and Art Scott is a coffee-table book that highlights the illustrious career of one of America's most recognizable artists (available November 11, 2014). I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that while I have long been an admirer of particularly striking covers of what we now call…
You know you’re officially a mystery fanatic when you start reading books about books. Luckily, over the years many studies of hardboiled and noir crime fiction have been published to meet the needs of just these kind of fanatics. Here’s a short guide to some of the best. 1. “The Simple Art of Murder” by…
The New Black: A Neo-Noir Anthology, edited by Richard Thomas, is a collection of twenty dark and twisted tales from assorted genres: horror, crime, fantasy, science fiction, magical realism, and the grotesque (available May 13, 2014). I tend to not get bogged down with defining genres. I’m sure some would question whether all or even…
To grass, in British underworld parlance, means to inform on others to the police. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it derives from the word “grasshopper,” Cockney rhyming slang for copper. The term has been around in Britain awhile, since the 1930's. In the 1970's, British journalists invented a new word, “supergrass,” to label an…
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…
If you trace the roots of literary noir back far enough, eventually you’ll run into the unlikely figure of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. Though in recent years she has been overlooked in the rush to canonize folks such as James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich, Holding was just as pivotal in the development of noir as…
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…
Frank Lovejoy just had one of those faces. He looked like 1952. Reserved and calm, under most circumstances anyway, he was perfectly believable as a white collar working stiff—an insurance salesman or an honest cop. You could buy that he put in eight hours at the office, drove home to the suburbs, and settled down…
