Thanks so much to Sarah for having me—I have to admit, I tend to be a blog lurker (blurker?) rather than a poster, so this is a new experience for me.

I see in Sarah’s kind introduction that she hopes that I might offer my take on where noir fiction is headed, and where women fit into the bill. I’m still working on that one (my views on it seem to change daily), but I sure would like to hear what all of you think. For myself, my thinking on it is rather split between my reader/academic side (a more analytical love of genre twists and subversion, the ways noir can be celebrated but also turned on its head) and my writer side (I haven’t yet been able to figure out how to step away from what I write and figure out where it fits in to the tradition I love so dearly—or what the future of that tradition might be). …

I should be in a more hardboiled state of mind, having just torn through the new edition of Jack Webb’s The Badge: True And Terrifying Crime Stories That Could Not Be Presented on TV, a real retro treat, written in Webb’s signature Dragnet cadences. It’s filled with fun stuff, including recountings of many of the big ’40s-50s headline-grabbing crimes (Stephen Nash’s “thrill murders,” Donald Bashor’s “sleeping lady murders”) a glossary of police terms and an organizational chart of the LAPD circa 1958. James Ellroy pens the new intro and he writes about how his father first gave him the book when Ellroy was an 11-year-old, and it ended up “shap[ing] his curiosity whole,” giving him a “sustained subject matter and a time and place to re-create anew.” For Ellroy, it was “one-stop imaginative shopping.” He says, “I found all my stuff in one book.” And the book is in many ways a road map for the historical touchstones in Ellroy’s novels. It made me start thinking about the book that most shaped my curiosity as a reader and a writer. For me, I think it’s Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, for its moody romanticism, its musky portrait of 1940s Los Angeles, especially the waterfront pier area in Santa Monica (Chandler’s Bay City) and Central Avenue, etc. A close second would be James M. Cain’s Postman Always Rings Twice, for its tabloid poetry (only Cain could get away, barely, with a line like, “She looked like the great grandmother of every whore in the world. The devil got his money’s worth that night.”). These books may or may not be on your “10 Best” lists or even be among your “favorites” (e.g., for me, The Long Goodbye is the best of Chandler) but somehow have become this imaginative backdrop you can’t escape from, that keep informing what you read, write, the movies you want to see.