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What are some good noir/crime novels?
Does anyone have any recommendations on good noir/crime novels? It's a genre I'm not especially familiar with, but would like to get in to.
Detectives/private eye type of things. "Hard-boiled" if you will.
As noted Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet are the 2 giants of hardboiled fiction.
However James M. Cain and Jim Thompson are right up there with them.
The genre is generally thought of to have been pioneered by Carrol John Daly (sadly his stories are no longer in print) He wrote for what were known as pulp magazines back in the 20's and 30's and up into the 50's. There is an imprint of Random House (...I am fairly sure) called Black Lizard or Black Lizrad series and it reprints many of the classic hardboiled stories from back in the day. An excellent place to start re3ading would be
"The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories" edited by Penzler
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Lizard-Stories-Vintage-Original/dp/0307455432/ this volume collects many of the essential hardboiled stoires from the great crime pulp "Black Mask"
Then you might want to read besides the obligatory Hammet and Chandler
"Double Indemnity" and "The Postman Always Rings Twice" by James M. Cain
"The Killer Inside Me" and "Savage Night" by Jim Thompson
There is Dorothy Hughes, the lone woman of the great noir pantheon. Her "The Blackbirder" and "Ride the Pink Horse" plus her books are set in the southwest giving a nice little twist to the generally urban setting of most noir/hardboiled stories.