Saturday, December 05, 2015

Favourite Noir Fiction and Non-Fiction, 2015















Fiction

(in no particular order)

- Women Crime Writers of the 1940s and 50s. Edited by Sarah Weinman, with stories by Very Caspary, Helen Eustis, Dorothy B. Hughes, Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, Charlotte Armstrong, Patricia Highsmith, Margaret Millar, Dolores Hitchens.

- My Face For the World to See by Alfred Hayes

- Hold the Dark by William Giraldi

- Under Tiberius by Nick Tosches

- The Great Swindle by Pierre Lemaire, translated by Frank Wynne

- Nobody Walks by Mick Herron

- It Always Rains on Sunday by Arthur La Bern

- A Very British Ending by Edward Wilson

- Little Sister Death by William Gay

- The Good Physician by Kent Harrington

- Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel, translated by Boris Dralyuk

- Speak of the Devil/The Obstinate Murderer by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding



Non-fiction

-Meanwhile There Are Letters- Ross Macondald/Eudora Welty, edited by Suzanne Marr and Tom Nolan

-The Other Paris- An Illustrated Journey Through a City's Poor and Bohemian Past by Luc Sante

-Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms- The Spy Hunter, the Fashion Designer and the Man From Moscow by Paul Willetts

-Empire of Sin- A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder and the Battle For New Orleans- by Gary Kirst

-The Devil's Chessboard- Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America's Secret Government by David Talbot

-The Crime of Our Lives by Lawrence Block

-Ghettoside- Investigating a Homicide Epidemic by Jill Levoy

2 comments:

Stv_Emerson said...

Many thanks, Woody, for the lead on the new Red Cavalry. Reading it with pleasure--and a wonderful object to hold in the hand.

Woody Haut said...

I tend to agree with Boris Dralyuk, translator of this Pushkin Press edition, that Babel is something of a hardboiled-noirist, with similarities to Hammett (both born in 1894), summed up by lines from a late story, The Story of My Dovecote: "My Uncle Lev, my father's brother studied at the Yeshiva in Voloshin, evaded conscription in 1892, and abducted the daughter of a quartermaster serving in the Kiev military district. Uncle Lev took this woman to California, to Los Angeles, where he abandoned her, and he died in a madhouse among Negroes and Malays. After his death, the American police sent us his belongings- a large trunk reinforced with brown iron hoops- from Los Angeles. In this trunk were dumbbells, locks of a woman's hair, Uncle Lev's tallish, whips with gilded tips, and herbal tea in little brown boxes trimmed with cheap pearls."