title: A Century of Noir: Thirty-two Classic Crime Stories
author: Various
description: Shamus-winner Max Allan Collins and crime-novel king Mickey Spillane team up to co-edit A Century of Noir: Thirty-two Classic Crime Stories, a collection that includes tales by the aforementioned as well as by luminaries such as Chester Himes, James M. Cain, Donald E. Westlake, Sara Paretsky and Evan Hunter. It may not actually span a century, but this volume offers plenty of blood, booze and cigarette smoke in worlds populated by flinty men and fetching women. <br />Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
zlib_text: # AFTERWORD
  
  
  
  
  
  WHAT IS noir? The old saw about pornography applies: You will know it when you
  see it. Varying in temperature from downbeat to gloomy—in other words, below
  freezing in either case—varying in locale from urban ghettos to squalid little
  towns controlled by political machines, noir is actually surprisingly
  unvaried. Think betrayal, think murder, think secrecy and crookedness, and
  you’re pretty much there. But for much the same reason that the most
  threatening street in the red-light district may support a plush, safe bar or
  even a business-class hotel, noir’s grittiest page-turners are sometimes
  inhabited by heroes who are strangely—heroic. Raymond Chandler’s protagonist,
  the private eye Marlowe, to whom the word “hardboiled” has been so often
  attached that it’s now stuck to his shoe like chewing gum, is actually a
  softy: compassionate, even ethical in the bourgeois sense. He doesn’t mind
  being nasty to stuck-up rich bitches or hiding the occasional dead body; all
  the sam