People who like Chandler aren't actually all that likely to enjoy Hammett, if it's Chandler's use of rhetoric they like.

Yes, this. I've read all of Chandler a couple of times and love him to death, but (please forgive me, Corwood) I've staggered through the first two chapters of Red Harvest three or four times in the past three years and found myself paralyzed with not caring very much.

Charles Willeford is bleak and hard and cold and heartless and all his novels live in the borderland between noir and lurid-covered trash (though most of them were published on the trash side of the border), and is consequently a great deal of dark ugly fun.

For a fairly new spy novel you might like Bodyguard of Lies by Bob Doherty - I found it hard to get through the first parts but it picked up after a while.

Wasn't Cornell Woolrich credited with the naming of noir after he wrote a series of books with "black" in the title?

And for classic locked-room mysteries, there's John Dickson Carr (who also wrote as Carter Dickson and Carr Dickson) - he wrote a huge number of books, many of which I didn't like, although at his best he creates a very creepy atmosphere.

edited to close the tag

"The Long Goodbye" is my favorite, and yeah, although I respect Hammett's place in the field, I think I'm a Chandler partisan. Which is kind of messed up for a blonde chick.

Wasn't Cornell Woolrich credited with the naming of noir after he wrote a series of books with "black" in the title?

I don't know. I do have an omnibus of his stuff (not a complete works), and the only anywhere near close title is Waltz into Darkness. (Which is a period novel, ironically; it's an identity switcheroo of the 19th C.)

The conventional wisdom I've always heard has been retronymic: French cinephiles observed the film patterns and described the trend just as it was ending, in the mid-50s; once film noir entered the critical parlance, the general term roman noir and its population of novelists began to be described.

(Of the films, Black Angel is based on a Woolrich novel, and is the only "Black [X]" film title in the noir encyclopedia. There are a bunch of "Dark [X]" and "Night [X]" titles, however, including Dark City (1950), Dark Victory, The Dark Corner, The Dark Mirror, The Dark Passage, Night and the City, Nightfall, and so on.)

please forgive me, Corwood

Oh, of course. I prefer Chandler to Hammett, too, at least in literature. Gimme jaded existential mysteries over bad-tempered tough guys any old day of the week.

huh ... I read one Chandler and didn't much like it, but I've read all of Hammett and looked for more.

No love for Jim Thompson? Noiriest of the Noir.

Can't place him by name...which did he write?

He wrote The Grifters, which was made into a film. Also The Getaway and After Dark, My Sweet. I like his autobiography, Bad Boy, also Pop. 1280 and The Golden Gizmo.

The Killer Inside Me! A Hell of a Woman!

Good times, good times. I'm pretty sure I stumbled over Thompson when I decided I should be reading more literature, so started pulling the trade paper from the Mystery shelves at the library.