Product Description

Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, David Goodis these are a few of the masters of noir responsible for the great lurid paperbacks of the thirties, forties, and fifties. With titles like The Big Sleep, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, and Street of the Lost, with racy cover lines like "My gun-butt smashed his skull!" and "Ruthless terror ripped away the mask that hid cold fear," and with some of the most extraordinary cover illustrations ever to grace American literature, these paperbacks held the ingredients of American nightmares. In Harboiled Americalavishly illustrated with 135 paperback covers, and expanded with new material on Thompson, Goodis, and othersGeoffrey O'Brien masterfully explores the art, history, and ideas of the American paperback.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #75648 in Books
• Published on: 1997-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 214 pages

Customer Reviews

Superb review of the genre by an excellent writer.
I first read O'Brien's book several years ago (in an earlier edition) on the recommendation from a collector who is also a fan of Jim Thompson. O'Brien is insightful, informative, engaging and right on in his assessment of an era of paperbacks and pulp noir that will never be truly recreated. What a wonderful work of literary criticism, beautifully illustrated and classically rendered. A treasure for the noir lover! I have it right next to my first edition original of The Killer Inside Me.