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three of our noir pieces from the past year.
Teeter’s ©
Dorothy Braudy
Artistic Pulp Sleaziness
Richard Stark
The Hunter (1962)
The Man with the Getaway Face (1963)
The Outfit (1963)
And 20 other titles. Reprints University of Chicago Press, 2008-2012.
Neal Pollack was right, the punk — my emails were way too formal. I’ve loosened up some, but I’ll never be a “Neal, I dig your stuff, so why dontcha…” kind of guy. In fact, I’m about the softest-boiled Noir Editor you’ll ever meet. Hell, chances are, I’m the only one you’ll ever meet. It’s a sweet gig, and one of the perks is assigning unusual pieces to unusual suspects. Richard Stark’s Parker novels are a warped chronicle of post-war American culture, a running commentary from the perp’s side of the two-way mirror. So who better to take stock of the series, now that U. of Chicago was releasing it in uniform? Neal Pollack — alternadad and yoga dude. I knew Neal had edited Akashic’s Chicago Noir and spent the 1990s on the politics and crime beats at the Chicago Reader. I had a hunch he was my man. I was right.
Soft-Voiced Big Men
Robert Crais
The Sentry: A Joe Pike Novel
Putnam, January 2011. 320 pp.
PI novels are read in one or two sittings and, all too often, are just as quickly forgotten. The closed cases pile up in cardboard boxes and grocery bags, ready for dispatch to “Friends of the Library” sales. (I’m not complaining, mind you. I’ve built a fine collection of paperbacks by scouring those sales.) But Robert Crais’s Cole and Pike deserve lasting consideration, which is why I asked Megan Abbott, reigning Queenpin of crime fiction, to place The Sentry in its proper context. No one has a better ear or keener eye for this kind of material than Megan. She’s a master, uniquely qualified to tap into that “powerful circuit” between Crais’s characters and his readers, and trace it back to its source.
Snappy and Reckless
Richard Hallas
You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up
[1938] Black Lizard/Creative Arts and Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1986. 213 pp.
My own emails might be too formal, but Woody Haut cuts right to the chase: “Just wondering if the LA Review of Books would be interested in an article on Richard Hallas (aka Eric Knight), author of You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up, arguably the greatest noir California Depression novel, published in 1938.” An offer I couldn’t refuse. Woody is among the most perceptive, knowledgeable, and devoted critics of the noir tradition around, and a subtle stylist in his own right. Over the course of the past year, the LA Review of Books has carved out its own island on the noir landscape – with plenty of room for a rediscovered treasure like Hallas’s novel.
Today’s best writers wrestling with works that slipped beneath the radar of most major publications, or that proved too daring and problematic for their own time? That’s why we’re here. Woody’s piece lends its name to our first genre collection, Snappy and Reckless: Notes on Crime and Noir, due out this May. There’s more to come.
Boris Dralyuk is the Noir Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
