THE NOIR THRILLER By Lee Horsley

Patti Abbott recommended THE NOIR THRILLER and she’s right: it’s a terrific book. It’s basically a study of hundreds of 20th Century thrillers, both books and movies. The chapters are topical. “Hard-Boiled Investigators,” “Big Shot Gangsters and Small-Time Crooks,” “Strangers and Outcasts,” “Fatal Men,” and “Fatal Women” give you a glimpse of the way Horsley organizes her material. And I really love the cover photo of Rita Hayworth. It really sets the tone for this insightful book. Horsley’s book should be the Official Book of upcoming NoirCon. GRADE: A

10 thoughts on “THE NOIR THRILLER By Lee Horsley

  1. Drongo

    Upon leaving this site, I will track down a copy. I hope this book gives Charles Williams at least a shout-out.

    Patti, it is my understanding that Lee Horsley is a member of the distaff sex.

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  2. Deb

    The book looks fabulous–and that was a great interview! I like what Megan says about how hard it was to get the English departments to take noir/hard-boiled fiction seriously. I’ll always be grateful to the English professor I had in my sophomore year of college. He assigned “The Big Sleep,” and I was hooked. This was in the late 1970s, so he was really going out on a limb to have us read something by Raymond Chandler while other professors were assigning Hemingway and Faulker (I like them too, but “The Big Sleep” opened my eyes to a whole world of fiction I don’t think I would ever have tried had it not been for that professor).

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    1. george Post author

      That’s one of the reasons I enrolled in the Ph.D. program at SUNY at Buffalo, Deb. They had a popular culture orientation chiefly because Leslie Fiedler was a big influence on the English Department. Hammett and Chandler are still part of their curriculum. Isn’t it great to have a wonderful professor who changes your life?

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  3. Richard Robinson

    I sure do wish this kind of writing was “approved” back in the Neolithic Age when I was in college. There was no way that popular trash would have been allowed into the classroom, in high school in the early 1960s or at the University of Arizona in the mid part of that decade. It was a strict diet of Melville, Hemmingway, Chaucer, Trollope, James, Faulkner, Dante, Shakespeare… you know the drill.

    No one had an inkling at that time that a person could EVER do a Master’s thesis on mystery fiction of any type. Not that I would have known what to say about it anyway…

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    1. george Post author

      The “canon” is less restrictive than it used to be, Rick. Some colleges and universities boldly introduced popular culture into their curriculum. My daughter took a course in MYSTERY FICTION at SUNY at Geneseo just a couple of years ago. It’s not just reading books by a bunch of dead old white guys.

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