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From the Moment They Met It Was Murder: Double Indemnity … by Alain Silver and James Ursini (2024)

When in July 1944 Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity hit American cinemas, it was only moderately successful. The movie performed well enough at the box office to be considered reasonably profitable, with estimated earnings between $2.2 and $2.6 million, which was sufficient to return a good profit for Paramount Studios. The film ranked 51st in box […]

Through a Noir Lens: Adapting Film Noir Visual Style by Sheri Chinen Biesen (2024)

Film noir productions generally are associated with dark settings, either because action  takes place at night or in unlit rooms, where street light creeps through Venetian blinds and struggles all the way to hit the protagonists on the set. Originally, such an outcome on the set in part was caused by filming conditions during wartime, […]

Perplexing Plots. Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder by David Bordwell (2023)

Generally, storytelling, narratives, modes of presentation and the story behind them, define most works of fiction and movie plots alike. As those techniques changed over the decades (as did audiences who step by step were introduced to this), new and exiting ways of shooting film and presenting characters entered popular forms of entertainment. The simple, […]

The Essence of Film Noir: The Style and Themes of Cinema’s Dark Genre by Diana Royer (2022)

Part of the unique intensity of noir and neo-noir movies is rooted in the combination of masterful scripts, extraordinary directors and the skillful highlighting of the psychological aspects wherever a protagonist needs to take action. But often is sabotaged while trying, to simplify one of many film noir plots. By carefully investigating the genre, several […]

Noir Fiction and Film: Diversions and Misdirections by Lee Clark Mitchell (2022)

With some interesting observations and a huge collection of data about genres in the book under discussion here, there are some good and fresh points concerning style, method and procedure, even when hard-boiled fiction and films noir are reduced to their most basic configurations. Naturally, there are variations of the stereotypes and, with regard to […]

The Detective and the Artist: Painters, Poets and Writers in Crime Fiction, 1840s – 1970s by J.K. Va

In the majority of crime fiction, there exists a relationship between the main characters. “The Detective and the Artist, then, concentrates upon the role played by poets, novelists, and painters in the detective story. These specialists in the production of works of aesthetic imagination are set in radical contrast to the defining figure of the […]

War Noir: Raymond Chandler and the Hard-Boiled Detective as Veteran … by Sarah Trott (2016)

Highly respected and valued by many fans of crime fiction and most likely America’s most distinguished crime writer ever, Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) together with Dashiell Hammett invented a new type of tough detective, independently of each other, they founded a style that later was described as “hard-boiled.” Many of their novels were turned into successful […]