huh ... I read one Chandler and didn't much like it, but I've read all of Hammett and looked for more.
Kaylee ,'Shindig'
Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
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.
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.
I understood that Roman Noir preceded Film Noir as a coinage, because American hard-boiled novelists were packaged in black covered books in France.
In the same way that Italian thrillers became known as Giallo - which means yellow, and refers to the yellow covers of the source novels.
Oh, yeah "The Grifters" Cusack was creepy in it.
I like Thompson a lot but prefer Willeford, especially his early stuff like The Pick Up and the High Priest of California and the Woman Chaser. (I have the movie version of the last on tape, starring Patrick Warburton.)
Oh, Cor, I am Skimmy McSkimmerpants, and I bow my head in shame before you.