No love for Jim Thompson? Noiriest of the Noir.
What am I? Chopped liver?
Mal ,'Our Mrs. Reynolds'
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."
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.
Oh, I know how it is. I'm just so much noirish background blather to you. Like Edward G. Robinson playing Charlie Brown's teacher.
Like Edward G. Robinson playing Charlie Brown's teacher.
"MWOMP WOMP WOMP, See?"
I understood that Roman Noir preceded Film Noir as a coinage, because American hard-boiled novelists were packaged in black covered books in France.
True, but not by much. The term film noir was first used in 1946, partly for the way they were shot, but mostly due to coming on the tail of the Série noire novels, which Gallimard started publishing in 1945.
Good to know the dissertation's good for something...
In your face, Jasper Johns Nutty!
In the same way that Italian thrillers became known as Giallo - which means yellow, and refers to the yellow covers of the source novels.
That bring to mind that I was just reading (in VIDEO WATCHDOG) about a German variation called Krimis, which was a series of crime films in the 60s based on Edgar Wallace novels (often extremely loosely). They're almost unknown outside of Germany, and share several characteristics with the Giallos (decadent characters, violent murders by elaborately masked people, etc.), and are mostly set (ostensibly if not recognizably) in England. Klaus Kinski got his start in those, usually playing a depraved red herring/victim.
Though I guess that is more of a discussion for film, not literary.
"MWOMP WOMP WOMP, See?"
Ha! This is the tiniest Venn diagram of humor in the world.
(It always makes me sad how little Edward G. Robinson is remembered by the filmgoing public. It's possibly helped along by the fact that the first film I ever saw him in was Double Indemnity, where he's the conscience of the piece.)