NOVELS THAT BECAME FAMOUS NOIR FILMS
Discover the gripping novels that inspired famous noir films. Explore classic books turned into iconic crime movies, from hardboiled detective tales to dark thrillers that defined film noir.


Book
Raymond Chandler: Later Novels and Other Writings (LOA #80)
by Raymond Chandler
The lady in the lade - The little sister - The long goodbye - Playback - Double indemnity - Selected essays and letters.

Book
The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories
by James M. Cain
These three classics from the master of the noir novel, along with five otherwise unavailable short stories, are electric with the taut narrative voice, the suspense, and the explosive violence and eroticism that were James M. Cain’s indelible hallmarks. The Postman Always Rings Twice, Cain’s first novel–the subject of an obscenity trial in Boston, the inspiration for Camus’s The Stranger–is the fever-pitched tale of a drifter who stumbles into a job, into an erotic obsession, and into a murder. Double Indemnity–which followed Postman so quickly, Cain’s readers hardly had a chance to catch their breath–is a tersely narrated story of blind passion, duplicity, and, of course, murder. Mildred Pierce, a work of acute psychological observation and devastating emotional violence, is the tale of a woman with a taste for shiftless men and an unreasoned devotion to her monstrous daughter. All three novels were immortalized in classic Hollywood films. Also included here are five masterful stories–“Pastorale,” “The Baby in the Icebox,” “Dead Man,” “Brush Fire,” “The Girl in the Storm”–that have been out of print for decades.

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Book
A Coffin for Dimitrios
by Eric Ambler
ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • The classic story of an ordinary man seemingly out of his depth, this is Ambler's most widely acclaimed novel, "one of the masterpieces of the genre" (The New York Times Book Review). A chance encounter with a Turkish colonel leads Charles Latimer, the author of a handful of successful mysteries, into a world of sinister political and criminal maneuvers. At first merely curious to reconstruct the career of the notorious Dimitrios, whose body has been identified in an Istanbul morgue, Latimer soon finds himself caught up in a shadowy web of assassination, espionage, drugs, and treachery that spans the Balkans.
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Book
Thieves' Market
by Albert Isaac Bezzerides
A dark, fast-paced proletarian novel originally published in 1949, Thieves' Market was written out of the author's youthful experiences as a trucker carrying produce to the packing houses of California's Central Valley. Immigrant Nick Garcos, like his father before him, becomes an independent trucker, soon landing in the brutal and crooked underworld of the produce markets of San Francisco, Oakland, Stockton, and Los Angeles. A dark, fast-paced proletarian novel originally published in 1949, Thieves' Market was written out of the author's youthful experiences as a trucker carrying produce to the packing houses of California's Central Valley. Immigrant Nick Garcos, like his father before him, becomes an independent trucker, soon landing in the brutal and crooked underworld of the produce markets of San Francisco, Oakland, Stockton, and Los Angeles.
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Book
Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s & 40s (LOA #94)
by Robert Polito
Presents six early classics of American noir fiction: James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Edward Anderson's Thieves Like Us, Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock, William Lindsay Gresham's Nightmare Alley, Cornell Woolrich's I Married a Dead Man, and Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They'. A companion volume collects works of the 1950s. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR