Chris,
In addition to the excellent suggestions of Hammett and
Chandler (which is chock full of the kind of humor that you
seem to like), a good introduction would be _CRIME NOVELS:
American Noir of the 1930s and 40s_ (Library of America,
1997). It contains James Cain's _The Postman Always Rings
Twice_, Horace McCoy's _They Shoot Horses, Don't They?_,
Edward Anderson's
_Thieves Like Us, Kenneth Fearing's _The Big Clock_, William
Lindsay Gresham's _Nightmare Alley_, and Cornell Woolrich's
_I Married a Dead Man_.
The companion volume is _CRIME NOVELS: American Noir of the
1950s_ (Library of America, 1997). It contains Patricia
Highsmith's _The Talented Mr. Ripley_, David Goodis's _Down
There_, Jim Thompson's _The Killer Inside Me_, Charles
Willeford's _Pick-Up_, and Chester Himes's _The Real Cool
Killers_.
Chep, they ain't, but they are simply beautiful editions. If
you've never held a Library of America edition in your mitts,
you've a treat coming. (I know, I'm a book nerd, but I love a
well-made volume.)
~Marc
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 09 Mar 2004 EST