In some ways, Joan Crawford might seem an odd choice for a hard luck lady of noir. Unlike many of the actors I’ve profiled in this series—people like Peggie Castle or Barbara Payton—who somehow missed popular success altogether and died penniless and forgotten, Crawford was a major success. In fact, as the silent era gave…
It’s become standard practice for us to talk about the novelistic nature of series television, but this shorthand is somewhat misleading. Certainly, now that shows like The Sopranos or The Wire can be viewed in their entirety we can appreciate the long character arcs, the deliberate progress of narratives over the course of a season,…
Raymond Chandler is considered one of the fathers of noir for good reason. His wonderful creation, Philip Marlowe, is one of the most popular detectives in crime fiction, and all of his books were adapted for films. In my opinion, the best of these is The Big Sleep (1946) adapted from the Chandler novel of…
Bad Blonde (1953) is the kind of movie that exists on two levels. On one level it is an entertaining film noir about an up-and-coming boxer who is lured into a scheme to commit murder by the duplicitous wife of a boxing promoter. I’ve seen this plot referred to as Body And Soul meets The…
Sunset by Christos Gage and Jorge Lucas is a noir graphic novel featuring Nick Bellamy, a 78-year-old army vet who’s out for revenge (available July 31, 2012). Sunset comes with a warning: “If you are reading this on any kind of e-device, Sunset protagonist, Nick Bellamy would most likely punch you in the throat, just…
First comes love. Then comes marriage. Then, at least in the lurid world of film noir, comes the inevitable murder attempt (check out Husbands from Hell for a few examples). Classic noir usually held the institution of marriage at arm’s length. Cops and detectives—almost all of whom were men—rarely went home to see the wife…
Daniel Woodrell is arguably as famous for his invention of the term “country noir” to describe his own writing as for his novel (turned movie) Winter’s Bone. Of course, he is not satisfied with the term, saying, “To me, noir means a story that ends tragically, and not all my stories do. But being thought…
I met a guy at a party one night who told me he didn’t like classic films. Without telling him anything about myself, I asked him why he didn’t care for the old stuff. “It’s campy,” he said. “It’s just so fake and over the top. The actors always act like they’re trying to broadcast…
Nine years ago, Charles Ardai, founder of Hard Case Crime, first heard about The Cocktail Waitress, the last novel written by noir great James M. Cain before he died in 1977. The book had never been published and no one seemed to know where the manuscript had ended up. Ardai knew the book would be…
There are two kinds of mystery fans: those who like mysteries with cats, and those who do not. Being a hardboiled hard ass, I naturally fall into the second camp. I’d rather be mauled by a tiger that read about the feline adventures of Sam Spayed and his girlfriend Kitty O’Shaughnessy. And I don’t say…
