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Title: Not much noir here
Review: I guess the editors decided that noir sells, the problem is there's not much noir here. Of the 30 some odd stories in this book, maybe a third of them could be considered noir. I guess the editors expanded the definition to any crime story. There are some good stories here, particularly by Carroll John Daly, Mickey Spillane, David Goodis, Max Allan Collins and Norbert Davis, but there's also a lot of mediocre stuff (most of the stories in the second half of the book range from fair to awful). Even terrific writers like Lawrence Block are represented by pretty bad stories (and as bad a Block's story is it's not even remotely noirish). I don't know, I have to think that if Spillane and Collins took this book more seriously they could have come up with a better representation of noir fiction. Even a noir master like James M. Cain is represented by a mediocre story that doesn't even classify as noir.
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