 |
| March 2010 |
| Billie Silvey |
 |
| Noir Detectives |
 |
 |
| In 1930, Dashiel Hammett started the tradition of the noir detective when he introduced Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. The San Francisco-based Spade was immortalized by Humphrey Bogart in a movie by the same name. |
 |
| The setting moved down the coast to Los Angeles in l939 with Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. It featured wise-cracking detective Philip Marlowe, who was also played by Bogart. |
| Hammett |
| Bogart |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Mickey Spillane's first Mike Hammer mystery came out in 1948. It was set in New York, with Ralph Meeker as the first of a string of actors to play Hammer. |
| Gumshoes changed into high heels and the setting moved to Chicago with the 1982 publication of Sara Paretsky's Indemnity Only. Kathleen Turner played Paretsky's tough detective with a love for expensive shoes in the movie V. I. Warshawski. |
| In 1991, Walter Mosley introduced detective Easy Rawlins in Devil in a Blue Dress. It's not just Hollywood hype to say that Denzel Washington was Easy Rawlins. I'd love to have seen him in the entire series, which traces the black experience and racial relations in Los Angeles from the end of World War II through the Watts Riots in 1965. |
 |
 |
| I have two special memories connected with noir detective novels. The first was when I was a child in the 1950s, reading my father's paperback of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly under the covers with my flashlight. I knew it was an adult book. The cover made that clear. But inside, the story swept me away with its gritty urban setting and thrilling, hardboiled detective action. The second was at a book signing at Eso Wan bookstore in Leimert Park 40 years later. Walter Mosley was signing his books, and I walked up with a stack. On top was my original edition of Devil in a Blue Dress. It was five or six years after it had come out. He looked me in the eye and commented on how old it was and that he wasn't sure there were stil1 any out there. Below are five noir novelists and the stars who played their alter egos. |
| Chandler |
| Bogart |
| Spillane |
| Meeker |
| Paretsky |
| Turner |
| Mosley |
| Washington |
 |