The Noir Thriller

What is literary noir? How do British and American noir thrillers relate to their historical contexts? In considering such questions, this study ranges over hundreds of novels, analyzing the politics and poetics of noir from the hard-boiled fiction of Hammett, Chandler, and Cain to the exciting diversity of nineties thrillers, with sections on the tough investigators, gangsters, and victims of the Depression years: the first-person killers, femmes fatales, and black protagonists of mid-century; the game-players, voyeurs and consumers of contemporary thrillers and future noir.