Tomorrow night the Seattle Art Museum kicks off the 33rd annual festival of After Midnight: The Film Noir Cycle. These shows sell out fast, but if you can’t get a seat or want to read some noir fiction, come to the Fiction Department at the Central Library and check out our display.
Noir fiction: a novel or mystery which features dark emotions and motivations: alienation, lust, greed, jealousy, pessimism, despair, sexual obsession.
Otto Penzler sums it up in a recent article on The Huffington Post:
Look, noir is about losers. The characters in these existential, nihilistic tales are doomed. They may not die, but they probably should, as the life that awaits them is certain to be so ugly, so lost and lonely, that they’d be better off just curling up and getting it over with. And let’s face it, they deserve it.
Some well-known examples of noir fiction (most of which were also made into films):
James M. Cain: The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity
Dashiell Hammett: The Maltese Falcon
Raymond Chandler: The Long Goodbye
Patricia Highsmith: Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley
Other important U.S. writers in the noir tradition are Cornell Woolrich, Dorothy B. Hughes, Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Elmore Leonard. Try looking up “noir fiction” in the keyword window in our catalog for lots of other possibilities.
Akashic Publishers has a series of noir compilations based on geography: ie London Noir, Paris Noir, Brooklyn Noir— a groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.
Other internet articles about noir:
Série Noire Project: Introduction
Why the hullabaloo about Noir Fiction?
~Beth K., Central Library
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