They called it Southern Gothic but we crime readers know it as pure hot noir. Hazel Motes returns from the army to find his family home abandoned. He drifts around the South, meets a man who introduces him to a strange spirituality, and decides to found his own anti-God ministry. A dark evocation of guilt and gullibility, WiseBlood is a stately, beautifully written and somewhat bonkers novel with one of the darkest endings ever, pre-figuring Psycho.
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Peter Grant is working as a teacher at an isolated school in the Australian Outback. In a nearby town, waiting for his train to Sydney, he stops at a pub and gets involved in a game of chance. He loses all his money and is stuck there for the summer. He’s befriended by a group of locals. They force him to drink massive quantities of alcohol before taking him on a wild night-time Kangaroo hunt. Things only get worse from there. Cook takes the noir tropes of Cain and Thompson and reconfigures them in a new and striking setting. Australia has never seemed so terrifying. PulpCurry reviewed the book’s release on Kindle here.
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Fowles’ first book provides the DNA for all subsequent serial killer novels from Red Dragon to Along Came A Spider. A man stalks a female art student. He kidnaps her and imprisons her in his specially-constructed basement. What follows is one of the best sparring matches in literature as she slowly turns the tables on her captor. A stunningly nihilistic ending too.
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Pynchon uses various genre characteristics in all his novels. 2009’s Inherent Vice might have been the more obvious choice here, a recreation of late-60 Venice Beach seen through the stoned Chandler eyes of its protagonist, PI Doc Sportello. But it’s Lot 49 where Pynchon first plays with the detective novel. Society hostess Oedipa Maas’ life is thrown into turmoil when she’s made executrix of a former lover’s will. Trying to fulfill her duties transforms her into a detective, uncovering a hidden society existing between the cracks of the America she thought she knew. Like most great writers, Pynchon realises we are all detectives searching for the meaning of our own realities.
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Bowles’ final novel is a razor-chilled burst of paranoia and marital hell. A bickering couple, steeped in ennui and resentment (based on the author and his wife, novelist Jane Bowles), arrive in South America. They meet a man who invites them to his villa. Once there, the man manipulates and toys with them, feeding them psychotropic drugs and teasing apart the fractures in their marriage. Tourist noir in extremis. Ian McEwan would take this plot and re-write it for The Company of Strangers.
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Ford’s recent book, Canada, began like a crime novel, its opening paragraph alluding to murder and betrayal, but his sophomore effort was pure Gonzo noir, an unholy cross between Malcolm Lowry and Ernest Hemingway. Your best friend is arrested and imprisoned in Mexico. What do you do? Go down and hatch a plot to break him out, of course. Inevitably, trouble ensues. A book about the decisions we make and the ones we don’t.
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Auster’s first work of published fiction takes the private eye novel and turns it on its head. A man answers a phone. The caller asks to speak to a Paul Auster. The man hangs up the phone but when it rings again he pretends to be Auster, a private detective, and takes on a case which drives him to madness and destitution. A vertiginous labyrinth of clues and absences, the New York Trilogy effortlessly manages to cross Beckett and Borges with Chandler and Hammett.
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James Ellroy was blown away by DeLillo’s retelling of the JFK assassination as conspiracy theory and personal history. So much so that he wrote American Tabloid, taking DeLillo’s central premise and turbocharging it with machismo and speed. DeLillo is more cerebral, probing currents of history and desire in shimmering sentences. A book about conspiracy as the necessary structural force that keeps the chaos of the world at bay.
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A schoolteacher at a loose end during the summer holidays is the set-up for this slice of elegant noir. Steve is lonely and bored. When a man knocks on his door and asks him for the attributes of his perfect woman, Steve complies, thinking his caller mad. When the perfect woman appears at his door a couple of days later, events take a weird and deliciously dark turn. A sexy, sophisticated noir told in precise chilling sentences, as much James M Cain as John Cheever.
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McCarthy had already written a stark dark serial killer novel in 1973’s Child of God, but with NCFOM he attacked the crime novel head-on. The ingredients are pure noir: a cache of drugs and money abandoned in the desert, a good man down on his luck, a remorseless wraith-like killer and the wide howling spaces of the American West. McCarthy ratchets up the tension as the book heads towards its inexorable climax. A stunning thriller that’s also a meditation on how America’s sense of itself and its values fundamentally changed in the years between World War II and Vietnam.
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Stav Sherez is the author of Eleven Days and A Dark Redemption. To follow him on Twitter click here. A big thank-you goes out to Stav for this contribution.
