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From Sherlock Holmes to Sam Spade; Nick and Nora Charles to Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin; Harry Lime to Gilda, Madeleine Elster, and other femmes fatales-crime and crime solving in fiction and film captivate us. Why do we keep returning to Agatha Christie's ingenious puzzles and Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled murder mysteries? What do spy thrillers teach us, and what accounts for the renewed popularity of morally ambiguous noirs? In The Mysterious Romance of Murder , the poet and critic David Lehman explores a wide variety of outstanding books and movies-some famous (The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity), some known mainly to aficionados-with style, wit, and passion. Lehman revisits the smoke-filled jazz clubs from the classic noir films of the 1940s, the iconic set pieces that defined Hitchcock's America, the interwar intrigue of Eric Ambler's best fictions, and the intensity of attraction between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. He also considers the evocative elements of noir-cigarettes, cocktails, wisecracks, and jazz standards-and offers five original noir poems (including a pantoum inspired by the 1944 film Laura) and ironic astrological profiles of Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich, and Graham Greene. Written by a connoisseur with an uncanny feel for the language and mood of mystery, espionage, and noir, The Mysterious Romance of Murder will delight fans of the genre and newcomers alike.

Noir Affect defines noir in relationship to negative affect. It traces noir's negativity as it manifests in different national contexts and a range of different media. The forms of affect associated with noir are resolutely negative: loss, sadness, rage, shame, guilt, regret, anxiety, humiliation, resentment, resistance, and refusal.

A longstanding misconception surrounding the term French noir suggests that the post-war French thriller and film noir were a development of, or response to, a pre-existing American tradition. This book challenges this misconception, examining the complexity of this trans-Atlantic exchange and refocusing debate to include a Franco-French lineage.

International reconsideration of Mexican film noir is a recent phenomenon. For decades, Mexican film criticism tended to dismiss the importance of this tradition and even to deny its existence, often citing the presence of melodramatic elements in would-be noir films and the lack of a crime novel tradition for screen adaptations. By comparing two Mexican films to similar American productions and examining the local political and economic conditions of the former, this article argues that Mexican film noir had its own pessimistic viewpoints, which were borrowed from journalism and the illustrated press. These viewpoints were based on existing social ailments and delivered relevant criticism of the institutions, classism, and sexual norms of the postrevolutionary Mexican state of the 1940s and 1950s. A revalorização do filme mexicano noir é um fenômeno recente. Durante décadas, no entanto, os críticos tendiam a descartar a importância desta tradição ou mesmo a negar sua existência. Muitas vezes, as razões citadas para esta exclusão foram a presença de elementos do melodrama nos filmes que poderiam ser reconhecidos como parte do gênero noir do filme e a falta de uma tradição mexicana de romance policial para sua adaptação. Comparando dois filmes mexicanos com filmes americanos similares e examinando as condições políticas e econômicas em que os primeiros foram produzidos, argumenta-se que o filme mexicano noir tinha suas próprias fontes para apresentar perspectivas pessimistas que eram livremente extraídas do jornalismo e da imprensa ilustrada. Essas perspectivas refletiam problemas sociais prevalecentes e incluíam críticas relevantes às instituições, ao classismo e às normas de gênero do Estado mexicano pós-revolução nos anos 1940 e 1950.

Off-brand for a studio known for its glossy Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, the epigraph, set against a backdrop of a knight holding aloft a cat pierced by his sword, references respectively a fictitious quotation, book, and author (see figure 1). In the Introduction to a collection titled The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler outlined the overall code and structure of his detective fiction featuring private investigator Philip Marlowe (such as The Big Sleep, 1939; Farewell, My Lovely, 1940; and The Lady in the Lake, 1943): according to Chandler, detective fiction tells of \"a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction\" (vii). \"[D]own these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid,\" Chandler concludes, providing a \"quality of redemption\"-or, more properly, a detective functioning as an heroic redeemer-unavailable to the naturalistic sufferers of a modern \"world gone wrong\" (\"The Simple Art of Murder\" 193). Identified as a discrete genre by French critics after its heyday in the 1940s, film noir comprises not only a cinematic style but also themes, plots, and characters located in postwar disillusionment and a loss of confidence in the ability of institutions to restore order in the naturalistic \"mean streets\" of the urban jungle.2 Beginning with the movie version of Double Indemnity (1944), with its moody atmospherics of smoky, shadowed daytime interiors punctuated with strips of lights through Venetian blinds, films noir placed the viewer in the position of the point-of-view character forced to interpret situations in which nothing is as it seems.

Swedish crime fiction became an international phenomenon in the first decade of the 21st century, starting first with novels but then percolating through Swedish-language television serials and films and onto English-language BBC productions and Hollywood remakes. This book looks at the rich history of 'Scandinavian noir', examines the appeal of this particular genre and attempts to reveal why it is distinct from the plethora of other crime fictions.

The book conceives the literary and cinematic category of “noir” as a way of understanding the defining conflict between authenticity and consumer culture in post–World War II America. It analyzes works of fiction and film in order to argue that both contribute to a “noir tradition” that is initiated around the end of World War II and continues to develop and evolve in the present. All of noir’s evolutions have taken place as responses to consumer culture; in the postwar era this consumer culture has become conflated with American citizenship, and the noir tradition presents itself as an “authentic” alternative to this republic of consumption. In order to see how noir and its descendants stage the confrontation between consumer culture and authenticity, my analysis is concentrated on how the texts that I write about represent various kinds of American commercial spaces. This analysis has a three-part structure, organized around the three key moments in the development of the noir tradition that I identify: (1) the postwar moment, as represented by classic film noir and hard-boiled detective fiction; (2) the sixties era, during which noir film and fiction are transformed and take the new form of the conspiracy narrative; and (3) the post-eighties period of dominant postmodernism, in which noir themes and aesthetics are revived, with a difference, to facilitate ways of responding to the phenomenon of global capitalism.

Dystopic imagery has figured prominently in modern depictions of the urban landscape. The city is often portrayed as a terrifying world of darkness, crisis, and catastrophe.Noir Urbanismstraces the history of the modern city through its critical representations in art, cinema, print journalism, literature, sociology, and architecture. It focuses on visual forms of dystopic representation--because the history of the modern city is inseparable from the production and circulation of images--and examines their strengths and limits as urban criticism. Contributors explore dystopic images of the modern city in Germany, Mexico, Japan, India, South Africa, China, and the United States. Their topics include Weimar representations of urban dystopia in Fritz Lang's 1927 filmMetropolis; 1960s modernist architecture in Mexico City; Hollywood film noir of the 1940s and 1950s; the recurring fictional destruction of Tokyo in postwar Japan's sci-fi doom culture; the urban fringe in Bombay cinema; fictional explorations of urban dystopia in postapartheid Johannesburg; and Delhi's out-of-control and media-saturated urbanism in the 1980s and 1990s. What emerges inNoir Urbanismsis the unsettling and disorienting alchemy between dark representations and the modern urban experience. In addition to the editor, the contributors are David R. Ambaras, James Donald, Rubén Gallo, Anton Kaes, Ranjani Mazumdar, Jennifer Robinson, Mark Shiel, Ravi Sundaram, William M. Tsutsui, and Li Zhang.

Paco Ignacio Taibo II's José Daniel Fierro novels Leonardo's Bicycle (1993) and Life Itself (1987) use \"foreignness\" to explore the expectations and restrictions of the detective genre; the inconsistencies of identity, nationalism, and race; and the duality of the border. The term \"foreigner\" operates in Taibo's Frontera Dreams as a crucial metaphor for the out-of-place loner who can no longer return to the comforting certainties of law and order. Just as genre produces the outsider whose alienation results from expectations of generic conventions, the \"foreigner\" in Taibo also results from the border and the harsh realities of race and difference.

01 02 The study of detectives in classical Hollywood has often overlooked the B-Movie mystery series in favour of hard-boiled film, despite the fact that many of these crime series have a cult status among film fans. Hollywood's Detectives redresses the balance by examining key detective series of the 1930s and 1940s (including Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan, The Falcon and The Thin Man), as well as some that are less well-known (Michael Shayne and Torchy Blane) to explore the particular concerns and modes of representation within the detective film before the rise of hard-boiled and noir cinema. The book considers a range of concerns within the detective crime series, including the cinematic vaudeville of the B-Movie, the specific features of the detective film, the detective as an outsider and as a sign of disorder, ethnicity, national identity and class, while also examining the emergence and significance of hard-boiled and noir styles. 13 02 FRAN MASON Lecturer in Film and American Studies at the University of Winchester, UK,where he teaches in Film Studies and American Studies. He teaches and researches in film and culture with particular interests in Classical Hollywood Cinema, Crime Films and Postmodernism, andis currently researching Assassin Films and representations of the city on film. 19 02 Demonstrates a transition in Hollywood detective films during this period, from a focus on the 'whodunnit' style and the master-detective figure in the 1930s through to the development of the hard-boiled style and noir tendencies of the 1940s A new area of study - detective series have received very little critical attention up until now Fills a gap in the history of the development of film noir, which is a popular and widely-studied genre Taps into current scholarly interest in adaptation as most of these films were derived from literary detective fiction   16 02 Very little has been written on Hollywood mystery series of the 1930s and 1940s   Gates: DETECTING MEN: MASCULINITY AND THE HOLLYWOOD DETECTIVE FILM; SUNY Press 2006 (primary focus is on contemporary film, but offers some consideration of detectives in this period and genre as well) 04 02 Preface Exploring Detective Films in the 1930s and 1940s: Genre, Society and Hollywood 'Such Lovely Friends': Class and Crime in 'The Thin Man' Series Between Law and Crime: The Chivalric 'Criminal' Detective Englishness and America: Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes Ordering the World: The Uncompromising Logic of Charlie Chan and Mr Moto The Rise of the Hard-boiled Detective Conclusion: Noir Detectives, Rogue Cops, Undercover Men and Police Procedurals Notes Bibliography Index 31 02 A study of Hollywood detective films from the crime series of the 1930s to the rise of the hard-boiled detective film in the 1940s 02 02 The study of Hollywood detectives has often overlooked the B-Movie mystery series in favour of hard-boiled film. Hollywood's Detectives redresses this oversight by examining key detective series of the 1930s and 1940s to explore their contributions to the detective genre.