Noir mysteries and gumshoe detectives

[dead-ced-dead]

Can you lovely sods please recommend any good noir mysteries?

I've just picked up Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and I'm enjoying it thoroughly. It can be a classic or a more modern, post-modern take on it. Maybe even some modern YA takes on the genre. Any variation, any recs would be appreciated.

[jobotic]

Just wrote a long post and lost it so a quick one to say

Ross MacDonald - the Lew Archer novels

Will write more when not at work, sorry


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lew_Archer

[dead-ced-dead]

Just wrote a long post and lost it so a quick one to say

Ross MacDonald - the Lew Archer novels

Will write more when not at work, sorry


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lew_Archer

That happens to me all the time. HA. Thanks for the rec and I look forward to the longer response.

[Talulah, really!]

In terms of closeness in style to Raymond Chandler, the two early Spy Story Quartets of Len Deighton are worthy of consideration.

He captures the same sardonic tone and has a similar wry way with a simile. He conjures up place magnificently and stocks his books with memorable characters and (wise)cracking dialogue. Could happily find something worth quoting on almost every page, but here is just a selection from the opening page or so of Billion Dollar Brain.

"It was the morning of my hundredth Birthday. I shaved the final mirror-disc of old tired face under the merciless glare of the bathroom lighting. It was all very well telling oneself that Humphrey Bogart had that sort of face; but he also had a hairpiece, half a million dollars a year and a stand-in for the rough bits....

...Outside was February and the first snow of the year. At first it was the sort of snow that a sharp PR man would make available to journalists. It sparkled and floated. It was soft and crisp...Girls wore it in their hair and the Telegraph ran a picture of a statue wearing some. It was hard to reconcile this benign snow with the stuff that caused paranoia among British Railways officials...

...on the first-floor landing was painted sign that said 'Acme Films Cutting Rooms' and under that a drawing of a globe that made Arica too thin...

...(after finding out he has been out drinking all night his secretary)...leaned across and put a glass of water and two Alka Seltzer tablets on my blotter.
     'Why not put the tablets into the water?' I asked.
     'I wasn't sure if you could bear the noise.'

The first four novels The Ipcress File, Horse under Water, Funeral in Berlin and the above Billion Dollar Brain make up what is considered the Harry Palmer quartet, though the central narrator is never named and it was only with the film version that he came to be called that.

The recent Penguin classics re-issues brand the next four as 'Patrick Armstrong' novels, though again the narrator is not given a name and may indeed be the same person as the previous four, certain characters reoccurring, it isn't vital to the plots though and the books can be read in any order. These four are made up by An Expensive Place to Die, the most noirish of the books, Spy Story, Yesterday's Spy and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy.

See that ITV are starting a new version of The Ipcress File this Sunday and judging by the trailer it is going to have parts of the novel that the magnificent film version stripped out to get to a leaner storyline.

Ross MacDonald is great and I also give a shout out to Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder books, all the ones I have read are really good.
 

[Twit 2]

Paul Auster - The New York Trilogy

[jonbob]

Joe R Lansdale's Hap and Leonard books

[dead-ced-dead]

Thanks for the recommendations everyone. I've seen some of the Hap and Leonard TV show, so that's interesting and the quoted descriptions from the Harry Palmer books were amusing. Thanks all.

[steveh]

I'd recommend the massive Dashiell Hammett compilation The Continental Op. In the earlier stories he's still finding his feet as a writer but the later ones are almost as good as Chandler.

[studpuppet]

My recommendation is the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. They were the inspiration for Henning Mankell and most Scandi-Noir, and have spawned a few films and TV series over the years, but the original ten novels are police procedurals that cover Sweden's loss of innocence from 1965-75 (they were released one a year over that period). Each book has thirty chapters (each chapter written alternately by the authors), but the first novel covers a few months, while others can be as short as one day of events.
They're full of characterisation and social comment - sometimes the crime is central, sometimes it almost seems as though the case is solved as an aside to the lives of the cops and their families. there's also lighter elements as well as some dark humour along the way.

[Smeraldina Rima]

Noticing that you've got a Simpsons avatar, you might have come across John Swartzwelder's Novels (See Retinend's review of the first Frank Burly novel)

Thursday and Poisson du Jour have read most of these, so they might be able to say if one stands out. I enjoyed The Exploding Detective in which Frank Burly is powered by jet pack to be the flying detective.

"Aren't you that Frank Burly who works over on Third Avenue?" someone asked me. "That guy nobody likes?"

"Well, yes and no," I told him. I was Frank Burly, of course, but I was under the impression that a lot of people liked me. That I was quite popular. So the answer had to be "yes and no" there.

There was a lot of interest in 1930s American crime and noir fiction in the development of doubt filled French novels from existentialism through to the OuLiPo (workshop of potential literature). Albert Camus named The Postman Always Rings Twice as one inspiration for The Stranger; Nathalie Sarraute recognised the American novels as having been liberating to writers who unlike herself had lost all their confidence in psychological depth; and Sartre wrote that Sarraute's Portrait of an Unknown Man was written in the manner of detective fiction too. And Georges Perec's lipogram without the letter 'e', La disparition stands out from the OuLiPo. It was translated with the same constraint as A Void by Gilbert Adair.

In Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Jacques Moran begins a report in the second half of the book:

It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. I am calm. All is sleeping. Nevertheless I get up and go to my desk. I can't sleep. My lamp sheds a soft and steady light. I have trimmed it. It will last till morning. I hear the eagle-owl. What a terrible battle-cry! Once I listened to it unmoved. My son is sleeping. Let him sleep. The night will come when he too, unable to sleep, will get up and go to his desk. I shall be forgotten.

My report will be long. Perhaps I shall not finish it. My name is Moran, Jacques. That is the name I am known by. I am done for. My son too. All unsuspecting. He must think he's on the threshold of life, of real life. He's right there. His name is Jacques, like mine. This cannot lead to confusion.

I remember the day I received the order to see about Molloy.

And ends it:

Spoiler alert

Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.

[close]

[Ignatius_S]

I'd recommend the massive Dashiell Hammett compilation The Continental Op. In the earlier stories he's still finding his feet as a writer but the later ones are almost as good as Chandler.

Fuck, no.

Hammett is far superior to Chandler.

[dead-ced-dead]

Thanks all for the recs. I'm making a list. This thread also folds in nicely with the postmodern mysteries thread.

[Ignatius_S]

The Factory series by Derek Raymond - five books narrated by an unnamed detective sergeant from A14, a department specialising in the 'unexplained deaths' that no one cares about, set against the backdrop of Thatcher's Britain. The first is probably the best but all are worth reading and disturbing - Raymond was famously dropped by his publisher (but immediately picked up by another) when a new reader there, when reading the manuscript of I was Dora Suarez, felt acutely and physically sick.  Something not mentioned is that the reader admired the book but couldn't recommend it because of the way it made him feel.

Anything by Dorothy B Hughes but particularly, In a Lonely Place - the film starring Humphrey Bogart is an interesting adaption but very different to the book, which is a brilliant blend of psychological thriller and noir styles. The Blackbirder is one that I'm fond of as it offers a political dimension, bringing to mind Eric Ambler (who was a influence on her generally).

Anything by Dashiel Hammett - would also recommend Richard Layman's biography, which does a fantastic job illustrating why Hammett was so influential on the genre and how his stint with the Pinkerton's informed his moral code, reflected in many of his protagonists. As mentioned, the Continental Operative stories - particularly Red Harvest, which was, along with The Glass Key, Kurosawa used for Yojimbo - it's contested which one that Kurosawa used; the great man cited The Glass Key as the influence, but that's been contested by scholars. However, the torture and escape scene from the film adaptation of The Glass Key was basically lifted by Kurosawa in Yojimbo, undoubtedly. Whilst the Coen Brothers were heavily influenced by Hammett for Miller's Crossing and it could be argued - I certainly would - if that the film is to all intents and purposes their take on the book. The Maltese Falcon is pretty perfect interestingly, a story where it's never revealed what any of the characters feel or think.

Margaret Millar - anything, seriously anything. An incredibly versatile and brilliant writer, who trained as a psychiatrist I believe, which I think would contribute why the psychological elements to her works are so good. Although incredibly well-regarded (Christie, Symons - see below and Hughes, were big fans; the latter has parallels and they were both shared influences) and remains so, when alive was overshadowed by the work of her husband, Ken who wrote under the name of Ross McDonald, who today is best remembered for the Lee Archer books (Paul Newman played the character in two films) and he should get a mention.

The Colour of Murder by Julian Symons is an extraordinary work. The first part, 'Before' is a first-person narrative constructed from a young man's sessions with a psychologist, which leaves the reader thinking murder has been committed but as the second half opens, although it appears that one has been, it's not clear who the victim is, or who is the killer.  Set in the late 1950s Britain, the book has a very modern feel - largely because of the psychology behind the crime. I've read one more by Symons, The Progress of Murder, set a few years later, where a gang of young teddy boys are arrested after someone is knifed to death on bonfire night - the victims had previously had an altercation with the gang, but are the same boys involved in both events? I've read some online comments by people saying they have difficulty with Symons' work because of a lack of sympathetic and/or likeable characters; I don't think that's entirely true, but suspect that an aspect that some will find troubling is that these two present a rather bleak view of the world in general and life in Britain I'm particularly. The legal system may function as intended , but whether it's reaching a truthful conclusion, let alone a fair one, is another thing on both.  Whilst in the latter, the police detectives employ brutal methods - holding the teenagers away from a police station, without letting their parents know where they are, withholding legal counsel and employing physical violence to elicit confessions. I should say, there's a lot of black humour to Symons and in some ways, I feel the books could be seen as very dark comedies. Symons takes a rather jaundiced view of the legal system, but from what I've read, he was praised for how accurate proceedings are presented - in introductions to the stories, it's mentioned that a close friend was a very important legal figure, so obviously gleaned a lot of information from him. In TPOM, there's a lot to do with journalism and one of the main characters is a young, local reporter and prior to writing the story, Symons spent some time at a regional paper (two weeks at the Bristol Evening post, IIRC), which seemed liken an excellent investment.

Although largely forgotten today, Cornell Woolrich was up there with the likes of Chandler, Hammett and Cain - an incredibly prolific writer and where he excels is plotting and ratcheting up suspense.  There must be a least fifty films that have been adapted from his novel and short stories - Hitchcock's Rear Window was based on one of them, as are two of Truffaut's movies. I'm a big fan of old-time radio and the long-running anthology series, Suspense (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspense_(radio_drama)) must have used around twenty of his stories; You'll Never See Me Again starting Joseph Cotten is a particular favourite.

McCain's been mentioned and would particularly recommend The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity.

Elizabeth Sanxay Holding is an easy recommendation; Chandler was a noted admirer of her work. The Blank Wall is the one I would most recommend but don't want to give anything away....

[steveh]

Hammett is far superior to Chandler.

Chandler has a skill in evoking places and the ability to put you inside the heads of his characters which to me gives him the edge over Hammett. Would concede that Hammett at his best is better when it comes to plotting though.

[Jerzy Bondov]

My recommendation is the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. They were the inspiration for Henning Mankell and most Scandi-Noir, and have spawned a few films and TV series over the years, but the original ten novels are police procedurals that cover Sweden's loss of innocence from 1965-75 (they were released one a year over that period). Each book has thirty chapters (each chapter written alternately by the authors), but the first novel covers a few months, while others can be as short as one day of events.
They're full of characterisation and social comment - sometimes the crime is central, sometimes it almost seems as though the case is solved as an aside to the lives of the cops and their families. there's also lighter elements as well as some dark humour along the way.

Started these last week and I'm really enjoying them, cheers for this post

[Fonz]

The Dave Brandstetter series, by Joseph Hansen, span seventies/eighties socal, a bit like a gay Rockford. Brilliant writer. Comparisons to Chandler are fair.

[Swift]

I've read a couple of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct books and really like them. Focuses more on cops than private dicks, but still can be hardboiled. They were published from the 50s-2000s but the characters never age or acknowledge time passing. They just exist in the time period they were written in.

Just finished The Mugger. McBain sure does like his boobs. Every female character mentioned has "full, firm breasts".

[willbo]

I like Walter Mosely's stuff a lot. African-American themed pulp mystery, he writes a lot but he has 2 main characters I like, Easy Rawlins a black PI who starts in the 1940s (i think) and is now in the 1960s, and another present day PI who's name I forget (leonard something I think). One of the few mystery authors I still bother to read.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I like the Rob Grant futuristic spin on the genre where he's trying to solve a crime in a future world where incompetence is a protected characteristic but I think I might be one of the only people in the world who thinks that book isn't shit.

[Ray Travez]

Used to read a lot of Andrew Vachss. His Burke series is very hard-boiled. Burke is a paranoid urban mercenary, surrounded by a team of misfits who help him to achieve his aims. Often violent, and always dark. The series are consecutive, so if Burke gets fucked up by a character in one book, he might go after them in the next, but also they work as standalones. Footsteps Of The Hawk is a good one. Just found out that Vachss died last year; I have two left of the series to read, so I might finish them off to see how Burke's story ends.

Having written all this, I'm not sure if it's a noir mystery or not. Probably more 'hard boiled'. Well, there it is.

Doug J Swanson is good- Jack Flippo is a downbeat gumshoe in the Chandler tradition. Start with Big Town or 96 Tears.

Robert Ferrigno- a taut, tense style. Heartbreaker is the best one. A review from James Elroy- 'Consistently and casually knockout, brutal and hilarious'

[jobotic]

My recommendation is the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. They were the inspiration for Henning Mankell and most Scandi-Noir, and have spawned a few films and TV series over the years, but the original ten novels are police procedurals that cover Sweden's loss of innocence from 1965-75 (they were released one a year over that period). Each book has thirty chapters (each chapter written alternately by the authors), but the first novel covers a few months, while others can be as short as one day of events.
They're full of characterisation and social comment - sometimes the crime is central, sometimes it almost seems as though the case is solved as an aside to the lives of the cops and their families. there's also lighter elements as well as some dark humour along the way.

Borrowed The Laughing Policeman from my mum the other day. Three quarters of he way through and really enjoying it. Right up my street.

Has anyone else read the Mario Balzic novels by KC Constantine. I read maybe 5 of them that I managed to get through the library where I worked years ago but there's many more.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/125965-mario-balzic-detective-mystery