Lionel White - Steal Big/The Big Caper

 

As I mentioned earlier on the blog when discussing Grave Undertaking, Lionel White repeatedly returned to the heist formula. The two novels collected in this volume follow that same pattern, yet with noticeably different results.

The first novel proves the stronger of the two. It builds genuine tension through careful planning, clearly defined roles within the criminal team, and steadily escalating complications. The characters feel more sharply drawn, and — as is often the case in White’s fiction — one unstable personality ultimately destabilizes the entire operation. The collapse of the plan feels inevitable, but not arbitrary; it grows organically from ego, mistrust, and psychological imbalance.

The second novel, by contrast, feels more diffuse. While it contains the familiar elements of White’s method — preparation, execution, unraveling — the tension is weaker and the characters less distinct. The structure is still competent, but the narrative lacks the tightness and urgency that made the first novel compelling.

Jim Thompson - Nothing More Than Murder

In Nothing More Than Murder, Jim Thompson appears at first to be working within the familiar framework of Double Indemnity: an unhappy marriage, an affair, and a plan driven by money and insurance. Yet the novel gradually undermines that expectation. The crime ultimately gives no one anything of real value. There is no triumph, no glamorous payoff.

What truly drives the protagonist is not greed alone, but a provincial power fantasy. As the owner of a small-town movie theater, he sees himself as a local magnate, locked in petty rivalries and desperate to assert dominance. The murder becomes less a calculated financial maneuver and more an extension of his fragile need for control. Thompson strips the noir formula of its sheen and exposes the smallness beneath the ambition.

Among the writers published by Gold Medal Books, Jim Thompson remains, for me, the most compelling. Even more than David Goodis, whose work I admire but often find overwhelmingly atmospheric and steeped in a kind of relentless depression. Where Goodis immerses the reader in mood and despair, Thompson balances psychological darkness with structural control and narrative momentum. His novels feel less suffocating and more sharply observed, driven not only by emotion but by a clear understanding of character and consequence.

Jim Thompson - The Criminal

 

In The Criminal, Jim Thompson builds the narrative around the murder of a young girl and the accusation against a boy who knew her. Rather than functioning as a conventional whodunit, the novel unfolds through multiple perspectives, creating a fragmented structure that almost recalls Rashomon. Yet Thompson’s purpose is not to relativize truth but to expose the moral decay of individuals and institutions.

What I found particularly compelling is the battle between the district attorney and the boy’s defense lawyer, especially during the interrogations. Their questioning turns into a subtle contest of power and interpretation, where the boy becomes less a person and more a battleground for competing ambitions. The tension does not arise from discovering new facts, but from watching how authority shapes, pressures, and reframes those facts. The crime becomes a lens through which the legal system itself is examined — and quietly condemned.

Gil Brewer - Wild To Possess/A Taste Of Sin

 

When I bought Wild to Possess and A Taste of Sin, I thought I had discovered an interesting pulp writer. After finishing both novels, however, I was left rather disappointed.

Wild to Possess begins in an intriguing way: the protagonist discovers an attempted murder involving a woman and her lover, apparently motivated by money. The situation is complicated by his own secret — he once found a woman and her lover dead. As the story progresses, the lover’s brother appears and accuses him of being responsible for the deaths. The premise promises psychological tension and moral ambiguity, but as the plot unfolds, the structure begins to feel unstable and the characters’ motivations insufficiently developed.

In A Taste of Sin, there is a stronger emphasis on sexual tension and a planned bank robbery. While these elements could have created greater momentum, the story never quite achieves the necessary narrative control. The stakes feel lower than they should, and the tension fails to build in a convincing way.

It is perhaps worth noting that Gil Brewer struggled heavily with alcoholism and addiction to sleeping pills, something that may have affected both the consistency and discipline of his writing.

James Crumley - The Last Good Kiss

The Last Good Kiss (1978) is often cited as one of the key American crime novels of the late twentieth century, yet it ultimately transcends the boundaries of classic noir. Instead of a claustrophobic trap of fate, Crumley presents a vast American landscape — highways, bars, and motel rooms — through which private investigator C.W. Sughrue wanders more as a lost witness than as a traditional detective.

The novel is melancholic, darkly humorous, and slower than one might expect from the genre. The investigation provides the narrative framework, but the true subject is the exhaustion of the post-Vietnam generation, moral erosion, and a persistent sense of disorientation. Crumley builds atmosphere rather than suspense; his characters drink, talk, and drift through spaces that feel geographically expansive yet emotionally empty.

Crumley’s personal life — marked by long-term alcoholism and struggles with cocaine — left a visible imprint on his writing. His novels carry an authentic sense of self-destructiveness and inner disintegration, without romanticizing it. In The Last Good Kiss, alcohol is not a symbol of bohemian glamour, but part of the everyday existence of characters attempting to dull disappointment and loss.

For that reason, the novel reads less like classic noir and more like a literary novel featuring a private detective — a story of a search that reveals not only a missing person, but the emotional exhaustion of the world through which its protagonist moves.

Martin Goldsmith - Detour

 

Detour is one of the purest and most merciless examples of classic noir, a novel in which there is no investigation, no crime in the conventional sense, and no possibility of redemption. What remains is the inner collapse of a man who believes he is being hunted by fate—and the novel persistently suggests that he may be right.

The protagonist, Alexander Roth, is not a typical pulp figure. He is introspective, educated, and keenly aware of his own vulnerability, yet this awareness offers no salvation. Goldsmith masterfully employs interior monologue to show how a chain of coincidences, bad decisions, and ill-fated encounters turns into a prison with no exit. Fate in this novel is not a metaphor—it is an active force, cold and inescapable.

The book is short, dense, and stripped of everything superfluous. There are no psychological justifications and no attempts to comfort the reader with explanations. As in the finest noir fiction, everything is already lost; the tension arises not from whether collapse will occur, but when.

The female character is not a classic femme fatale but rather a weapon of fate—a figure who enters the story not to seduce, but to complete what has already begun. Her presence merely accelerates the movement toward the inevitable end.

Compared to the film adaptation, the novel is colder and more pessimistic. The film Detour offers unforgettable atmosphere, but the book goes further: it refuses consolation, irony, or distance.

Detour is a novel without illusions, noir in its purest form—a story of a man caught in a merciless game of fate, where every decision, even the most trivial one, leads to the same outcome.

Guy Cullingford - Post Mortem

Guy Cullingford was a pseudonym of woman crime writer Constance Lindsay Taylor who wrote bunch of classic murder mysteries. This one is particularly unusual, being a tale of dysfunctional family whose father performed suicide, and now his ghost is observing the inquest, funeral and in itself is becoming some kind of ethereal sleuth. There is quite dreamlike poetry in musings of ghost and family itself is quite unconvential.

Jim Thompson - Pop. 1280

Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 is one of those rare crime novels that is both darkly funny and deeply disturbing.

On the surface, it reads like a grotesque comedy, but beneath the humor lies something far more corrosive. Thompson turns the small-town setting into a moral wasteland, where cruelty hides behind smiles, politeness, and folksy charm.

What makes the novel so powerful is Nick Corey’s voice: deceptively simple, almost naïve, yet carefully calculated. Thompson had, like very few writers, a profound insight into the mind of a psychopath. He does not explain or analyze it — he lets the reader inhabit it.The humor works as a trap — you laugh, and only afterward realize what you’ve been laughing at. Thompson’s prose is sharp, economical, and relentless, stripping away any illusion of innocence. 

In a strange way, Pop. 1280 is also poetic. Its rhythm, repetition, and cold clarity give the novel a bleak kind of beauty. Thompson doesn’t decorate violence or evil; he presents them plainly, and that starkness creates its own brutal poetry.

This is crime fiction at its most cynical and intelligent — a novel that entertains, unsettles, and lingers long after the final page.

Thompson was a hard alcoholic and many of his novels were fueled by alcohol, and eventually it killed him.

Charles Williams - Hot Spot

Hot Spot is pure, concentrated noir, with no excess and no excuses for its characters. Charles Williams wastes no time: the story starts fast and then tightens like a noose. One wrong judgment is enough for everything to fall apart.

The protagonist is neither a detective nor a hero, but an ordinary man who believes he has control over the situation. Of course, he doesn’t. Williams masterfully builds the relationship between desire, greed, and fear, without moralizing and without illusions. The femme fatale here is not a myth, but a cold fact.

The novel is short but precise. Every scene has a purpose, every line of dialogue drives the story toward its inevitable end. There are no ten-page psychological explanations—characters are revealed through their actions, and fate is not something that can be negotiated.

Hot Spot is a reminder of why classic noir never grows old: it speaks about weaknesses that never change. The mistake is made once. After that, everything moves only downhill.

Richard Hallas - You Play The Black And The Red Comes Up

You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up is a bleak Depression-era noir that blends hardboiled crime with social despair. Richard Hallas (Eric Knight) follows a drifting, defeated protagonist through a world of chance, poverty, and moral exhaustion, where every decision feels like a losing bet. The novel moves episodically, with sharp observations and sudden violence, capturing a raw sense of fatalism without romanticizing crime. Less polished than Cain but closer to McCoy in spirit, it stands out for its grim honesty and restless energy rather than tight plotting.

Elliot Chaze - Black Wings Has My Angel

Black Wings Has My Angel is often praised as a noir classic, but its reputation rests more on style than substance. Elliott Chaze focuses heavily on atmosphere and fatalism, using long, overwrought sentences that can feel pretentious and self-conscious. The mood is dark and nihilistic, but there is surprisingly little actual action, and the pacing often stalls under the weight of its own prose. While the novel has moments of power and a strong sense of doom, readers who prefer leaner, more dynamic noir may find it slow and frustrating.

Boris Vian - I spit on your graves

The celebrated pataphysician Boris Vian wrote this short, oversexed crime novel, charged with erotic intensity and uncontrolled, almost surrealistic violence.

Beneath the mask of American hard-boiled fiction, Vian exposes the sexual hypocrisy and deeply ingrained racism of American society.
Overall, Vian is an exceptionally fascinating writer: he loved jazz, beautiful women, and provocation, and although he died young, he left behind an impressive and remarkably diverse body of work.

This book still provokes strong reactions today, precisely because it exposes deeply ingrained moral hypocrisy and racism. However, what I find interesting and appealing is what lies beneath the surface layer: a skillfully told crime story, infused with large doses of eroticism and dreamlike narration.

Robin Buss - French Film Noir

A few years ago, I enjoyed discovering what had until then seemed to me an almost unimaginable number of excellent old French crime films. While looking for context and explanations of that world, I came across this book, which presents the evolution of French film noir very clearly and readably — from early black-and-white works up to films of the 1990s.

I particularly liked that the author mentions some of my personal favorites, such as Going Places, Monsieur Hire, The Moon in the Gutter, Rififi, The Beast Must Die, The Clockmaker, Série Noire, L.627, Diva, and Subway. On the other hand, I was somewhat disappointed that in the final list of French noir films, titles like Blood Relatives, La Horse, Grilling, One Deadly Summer, Betty Blue, Deadly Circuit, Beau-Père, Without Apparent Motive, and Trap for Cinderella are not mentioned. Still, this is only a minor criticism of an otherwise very valuable book.

The author convincingly traces the development of French film noir from the 1930s to the 1990s, connecting it to literary influences such as Simenon (though unfortunately authors like Sébastien Japrisot, Jean-Patrick Manchette, and some other important crime writers are not mentioned). The chapter on France under the Vichy regime is particularly interesting, showing how anyone could have been a collaborator with Nazi Germany — even your neighbor — which perfectly suited the claustrophobic feeling of film noir.

The book then follows the post-war period, the 1950s and 1960s, and the emergence of new directors like Godard, Chabrol, and Melville. While American film noir of the 1940s and 1950s had a strong influence, the author rightly emphasizes that the relationship was mutual, as many elements of American noir actually originated in French traditions, particularly poetic realism.

One of the book’s strengths is its explanation of how French film noir, beyond its remarkable visual style, also served as a critique of society. However, with the advent of television and technological progress, style gradually became an end in itself while content lost weight — as can be clearly seen in films like Luc Besson’s Nikita.

Overall, this is a very valuable book for any admirer of French crime cinema. If you enjoy it, it is also worth taking a look at Andrew Spicer’s European Film Noir, which provides a broader European context.