A Summer of Noir

I often try to theme my summer reading – last year, I did a road trip theme, in which I read a book from a number of different states. This petered a bit, in the end, but was fun while it lasted. Also in years past, I’ve done themed reads around spy fiction/espionage, regency romance and fairy tale retellings.

This year, I’ve settled on mid-century (20th century, of course) noir for my theme. I’ve been in the process of purchasing a number of Library of America collections. So far, I’ve acquired:

• American Noir: 11 classic crime novels of the ’30’s, ’40’s and ’50’s, which contains the following novels:
  • The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
  • They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? by Horace McCoy
  • Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson
  • The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing
  • Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham
  • I Married a Dead Man by Cornell Woolrich
  • The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
  • The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
  • Pick-Up by Charles Willeford
  • Down There by David Goodis
  • The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes
• Crime Novels of the 1960’s, which contains the following novels:
  • Fredric Brown’s The Murderers (1961), a darkly comic look at a murderous plot hatched on the hip fringes of Hollywood.
  • Dan J. Marlowe’s terrifying The Name of the Game Is Death (1962), about a nihilistic career criminal on the run
  • Charles Williams’s Dead Calm (1963), a masterful novel of natural peril and human evil on the high seas.
  • Dorothy B. Hughes’s The Expendable Man (1963), an unsettling tale of racism and wrongful accusation in the American Southwest.
  • Richard Stark’s taut The Score (1964), in which the master thief Parker plots the looting of an entire city with the cool precision of an expert mechanic.
  • The Fiend (1964), in which Margaret Millar maps the interlocking anxieties of a seemingly tranquil California suburb through the rippling effects of a child’s disappearance.
  • Ed McBain’s classic police procedural Doll (1965), a breakneck story that mixes murder, drugs, fashion models, and psychotherapy with the everyday professionalism of the 87th Precinct.
  • Run Man Run (1966), Chester Himes’s nightmarish tale of racism and police violence that follows a desperate young man seeking safe haven in New York City while being hunted by the law.
  • Patricia Highsmith’s ultimate meta-thriller, The Tremor of Forgery (1969), a novel in which a displaced traveler finds his own personality collapsing as he attempts to write a novel about a man coming undone.
• Women Crime Writers: 8 Suspense Novels of the 1940’s and 1950’s, which collects:
  • Vera Caspary’s famous career girl mystery Laura;
  • Helen Eustis’s intricate campus thriller The Horizontal Man;
  • Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place, the terrifyingly intimate portrait of a serial killer;
  • Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s The Blank Wall, in which a wife in wartime is forced to take extreme measures when her family is threatened;
  • Charlotte Armstrong’s Mischief, the nightmarish drama of a child entrusted to a psychotic babysitter;
  • Patricia Highsmith’s brilliant The Blunderer, which tracks the perverse parallel lives of two men driven toward murder;
  • Margaret Millar’s Beast in View, a relentless study in madness;
  • Dolores Hitchens’s Fools’ Gold, a hard-edged tale of robbery and redemption.
• Raymond Chandler: The Library of America Edition, which contains a number of short stories, and all 7 of his Philip Marlowe novels:
  • The Big Sleep;
  • Farewell, My Lovely;
  • The High Window;
  • The Lady in the Lake;
  • The Little Sister;
  • The Long Goodbye;
  • Playback

There are a few more on my list to purchase (there’s a Ross MacDonald collection that I definitely want, and a Dashiell Hammet collection that I might want), but I have busted my book budget for the month, so it won’t be until at least July that I replenish the coffers.

When I think of noir, I always think of summer. It’s not merely lore, but is reality, that when temperatures soar, tempers fray and the homicide rate goes up. The 4th of July tends to be one of the deadliest days of the year, and there are numerous studies that reflect that, at least in the U.S., we become more violent, more angry and more murderous during our long, hot summers. I’ve long believed that August, not April, is the cruelest month.

This particular reading theme doesn’t just have a literary component, though. A lot of the books I’ll be reading were adapted into well-regarded films, and I plan to watch some of them as I finish the source material.

So, at least part of my long, hot summer will be spent on crime of a very particular sort.