Some people use noir to mean a spare writing style; others, a type of plot that tends toward deceit and despair. But it’s maybe best described as a place where no one wants to end up, literally or metaphorically.
It’s probably my favorite genre. I first got into noir through my father’s Black Lizard Press paperbacks. My father was not a criminally-minded man, but he gave me what every writer needs: good taste and a difficult childhood. Miss you, Dad.
These books will thrill you enough that you ought not to start them before bedtime — you won’t want to stop. But don’t look for happy endings here, or inspiration, unless you, too, want to be a be a writer whose work leaves people shellshocked.
By James Ellroy
This sprawling masterpiece about two Los Angeles police officers and the desires that drive and bind them was inspired by the real Black Dahlia: Elizabeth Short, found murdered and mutilated in Leimert Park in 1947, nicknamed for the floral tattoo on her thigh.
The case has never been solved, and there are a few books out there by people who think their own father was the killer. Ellroy’s father is in the clear, but his mother, Jean Hilliker, was murdered in 1958, and the two unsolved cases are forever linked in Ellroy’s psyche.
His gloriously excessive style brings his fantasy of midcentury Los Angeles to brilliant, glittering, hyper-violent life, and his personal obsession with the Black Dahlia case shines through on every page.
By Vicki Hendricks
In 1995, Vicki Hendricks reinvigorated the genre with her humid, heated, gender-swapped take on “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” Sherri Parlay, a good woman with a high libido, is seduced into murder by the beguiling heir to a dry-cleaning fortune. Soon, she finds that there’s more to him than his good looks and sexual skills.
After 30 years, no one has topped Hendricks’s take on female lust, and she remains the queen of Florida crime writers, with an understanding of the social ecosystem like no one else.
By Walter Mosley
Xavier Rule has a violent past, but he doesn’t want that to be his future. Where to turn except a church made up of people who are even worse than he is, all of them trying to redeem themselves, and held to strict standards by their leader, Father Frank?
When Frank asks Xavier to help another parishioner sort out her own sordid past, Xavier’s faith will be tested. Mosley is fearless and as incisive as a scalpel in his examination of evil — personal, spiritual, and institutional — and surprisingly hopeful about the possibility of overcoming it.
By Rachel Kushner
The cool, disdainful narrator of this literary thriller about an undercover agent among eco-activists and neo-primitivists is noir personified — and a character so strongly drawn you’ll find yourself thinking in her voice. She needs nothing, has an opinion on everything (often a correct one), and a heart for no one. Fittingly, the book takes place among the French, who realized what we Americans had with our black-and-white crime narratives before we did. That’s why we call it noir.
By Andrew Vachss
The darkest book on this list, “Shella” shocks from the first page both for its content and its unbelievably spare, direct prose. Ghost, a killer for hire, searches for his lost love, a stripper who may have turned serial killer, in the darkest corners of the underworld. There’s a tactile, pre-internet urban grit in this book that feels nostalgic and thrilling. Vachss excels at giving a real point of view and dimension to some of the most disturbing characters in modern fiction; you will be surprised to find yourself rooting for Ghost and Shella, and you’ll miss them when you turn the last page.
By Charles Portis
Portis, also the author of “True Grit,” has a plain-spoken style that is perfect for this violent descent through Mexico’s Yucatán; his flawless prose and eye for detail bring me back to this book over and over.
American expat Jimmy Burns has made a life of sorts for himself in Mexico, although he isn’t exactly embedded: “Once again there had been no scramble among the hostesses of Mérida to see who could get me for Christmas dinner.” Alone and aimless, he looks for a lost friend among a sinister cult. The search will bring out his most brutal impulses — and a sliver of heroism.
By Horace McCoy
Robert Syverten is a fresh-faced young man hoping to make it as a film director in Hollywood during the Depression — until he meets aspiring actress Gloria Beatty, one of the most grating, grueling and unforgettable characters ever set in ink. Hungry and broke, they join a dance marathon together. What could go wrong? The opposite of the Hollywood success story, this tale goes in one direction only — straight down — and announces its trajectory from the opening page.
By Hansen Shi
Michael Wang, the narrator of this slim espionage tale, lives in every crime writer’s (or at least this writer’s) dream location: a loft above a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
By day he works for General Motors developing a self-driving car, so alienated from his peers that they hardly notice when he flies to China for a week. By night he freelances as a hacker and admires the expensive coffee maker and stereo he hopes will make him happy.
Shi brings the noir thriller to the modern world of tech, weaving in corporate absurdity, Asian American identity and the ways families inadvertently recreate their failures. A note of hope almost disqualifies “The Expat” from this list, but its brutally sharp style and downward trajectory firmly plant its flag.
