In his debut novel, An Honest Living, Dwyer Murphy takes readers on an odyssey through time and space in turn-of-the-21st-century New York City, complete with its own Ulises, who just happens to be a Venezuelan poet. Along this journey with nods to past noir novelists such as Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler (think mysterious beautiful… Read more »
Posts Tagged: noir
Episode 232: Stewart O’Nan
Is there any location riper for noir than a small town high school? Except maybe the heart of a teenager? Stewart O’Nan’s new noir novel Ocean State, isn’t so much a “whodunit” as a “why-dunit” story of the murder of a teenage girl and the ripples the crime and its aftermath cause in a small… Read more »
Episode 166: Sean Carswell
In Sean Carswell’s Dead Extra, post World War II Southern California is a dark and stormy place in spite of the sunshine. Jack Chesley Jr., presumed dead in the war, comes home to find out that his wife has died…and that’s not the worst of it
Episode 123: T. Jefferson Parker
In The Room of White Fire, T. Jefferson Parker’s first book of a new series, private investigator Roland Ford is hired by Arcadia, an exclusive mental health facility, to find a patient who has escaped. But finding that patient is going to mean traveling through some of the darkest spaces imaginable left over from the… Read more »
Episode 83: T. Jefferson Parker
No one writes crazy quite like T. Jefferson Parker. Not teeth-gnashing, over-the-top-bad-guy-psycho-killer crazy, but crazy on a Biblical, mythical scale, the crazy of obsession and families with conflicts that span generations. And so it is in Crazy Blood, T. Jefferson Parker’s latest, a dark noir tale set in the world of blinding white snow Photo… Read more »
Episode 62: Kelli Stanley
San Francisco’s first lady of Noir has her own tales of the City, including her most recent Miranda Corbie novel, City of Ghosts Kelli’s Noir cred goes beyond San Francisco of 1940, her other series, which features Arcturus, a physician of Roman Britain, began with Nox Dormienda, a nod to Raymond Chandler.
Episode 59: Vu Tran
Set in Las Vegas, the highly atmospheric, deeply noir Dragonfish, Vu Tran’s first mystery novel, takes its name from the Asian arowana, an endangered fish that’s supposed to bring good luck and keep evil away. But in the story of the intertwining lives of Robert, the Oakland cop, Suzy, his Vietnamese wife and Sonny, the Vietnamese gangster who… Read more »
Episode 49: Tom Nolan
Who better than Ross Macdonald biographer Tom Nolan to edit what we can only hope is the first of many anthologies of the California noir great’s mysteries for The Library of America? Photo of Tom Nolan ©David Strick
