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Fade to Blonde

Max Phillips · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

White Jazz

James Ellroy · 368 pages

The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia. Los Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns-it's standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an enforcer-a power in his own small corner of hell. Then the Feds announce a full-out

NoirHollywoodCrimeFirst Person Narrator
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The Big Sleep

Raymond Chandler · 220 pages

Philip Marlowe, a private eye who operates in Los Angeles's seamy underside during the 1930s, takes on his first case, which involves a paralyzed California millionaire, two psychotic daughters, blackmail, and murder

NoirHollywoodCrimeFirst Person Narrator
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In a Lonely Place

Dorothy B. Hughes · 224 pages

Postwar Los Angeles is a lonely place where the American Dream is showing its seamy underside—and a stranger is preying on young women. The suggestively named Dix Steele, a cynical vet with a chip on his shoulder about the opposite sex, is the LAPD's top suspect. Dix knows enough to watch his step, especially since his best friend is on the force, but when he meets the luscious Laurel Gray—a femme

NoirHollywoodCrimeMale Lead
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Drive

James Sallis · 159 pages

"Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake. Later still, of course, there'd be no doubt."--Inside cover.

NoirHollywoodCrimeMale Lead
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The Fade Out: Act Three

Ed Brubaker · 360 pages

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Kiss Me, Deadly

Mickey Spillane · 205 pages

NoirCrimeFirst Person NarratorMale Lead
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The Vengeful Virgin

Gil Brewer · 181 pages

**Her wealthy stepfather was dying — but not quickly enough** What beautiful 18-year-old would want to spend her life taking care of an invalid? Not Shirley Angela. But that’s the life she was trapped in — until she met Jack. Now Shirley and Jack have a plan to put the old man out of his misery and walk away with a suitcase full of cash. But there’s nothing like money to come between lovers

NoirCrimeFirst Person NarratorMale Lead
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The Postman Always Rings Twice

James M. Cain · 128 pages

Frank Chambers, un trotamundos sin empleo, narra en primera persona la atracción que siente por Cora Papadakis, la esposa de un emigrante de origen griego propietario de una taberna en California, y cómo se vuelven amantes unidos por el ardor y la ambición. Pero no será tan fácil librarse del viejo marido. Y habrá que contar, además, con el inescrutable destino: ese cartero que siempre llama dos v

NoirCrimeFirst Person NarratorMale Lead
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Complete Novels: Red Harvest / The Dain Curse / The Maltese Falcon / The Glass Key / The Thin Man

Dashiell Hammett · 967 pages

"In a few years of extraordinary creative energy, Dashiell Hammett invented the modern American crime novel."--BOOK JACKET. "The five novels that Hammett published between 1929 and 1934, collected here in one volume, have become part of modern American culture, creating archetypal characters and establishing the ground rules for a whole tradition of hardboiled writing."--BOOK JACKET. "Each novel

NoirCrimeFirst Person NarratorMale Lead
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A Hell of a Woman

Jim Thompson · 288 pages

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Pain Management

Andrew Vachss · 321 pages

Andrew Vachss's previous novel, Dead and Gone, prompted the Rocky Mountain News to say, "Starting a Vachss novel is like putting a vial of nitroglycerine into your pocket and going for a jog." With his latest thriller, Vachss turns the heat up a notch by dropping his career criminal and ultimate urban survivalist, Burke, in the middle of some of the most dangerously determined humans he has ever

NoirCrimeFirst Person NarratorMale Lead
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The Twenty-Year Death

Ariel S. Winter · 670 pages

Told in the form of three complete novels that, taken together, tell a single epic story, The twenty-year death tells the tale of a young actress and her writer husband. Over the course of 20 years, violence will intrude on their lives 3 times.

NoirHollywoodCrimeDark
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Cross

Ken Bruen · 288 pages

A boy has been crucified in Galway city. People are shocked; the broadsheets debate what this says about the state of the nation; the Irish Church is scandalised. No further action is taken. When the sister of the murdered boy is burned alive, PI Jack Taylor decides to take matters into his own hands. Taylor’s investigations lead him to some old city haunts where he encounters ghosts – living and

NoirCrimeFirst Person NarratorMale Lead
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Blacksad

Juan Diaz Canales, Juanjo Guarnido · 54 pages

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361

Donald E. Westlake · 194 pages

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Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go

George P. Pelecanos · 234 pages

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Kiss Me, Judas

Will Christopher Baer · 316 pages

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Get Carter

Ted Lewis · 281 pages

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The Last Good Kiss

James Crumley · 254 pages

C.W. Sughrue, a Montana private eye, is hired to track down a failing author and winds up searching for Betty Sue Flowers, a woman missing for ten years in Haight-Ashbury.

NoirCrimeFirst Person NarratorMale Lead
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The Song Is You

Megan Abbott · 256 pages

On October 7, 1949, starlet Jean Spangler kissed her daughter goodbye, she was never seen again. The only clues left behind: a purse, a cryptic note, and rumours about mobster boyfriends. Two years later, smooth-talking Hollywood publicist `Hop` finds himself unwillingly drawn into the unsolved mystery. Plunging deeper and deeper into Hollywood's substratum in his attempt to uncover the truth.

NoirHollywoodCrimeDark
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Darkness, Take My Hand

Dennis Lehane · 480 pages

The master of the new noir, Dennis Lehane magnificently evokes the dignity and savagery of working-class Boston in this terrifying tale of darkness and redemption. Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro's latest client is a prominent Boston psychiatrist running scared from a vengeful Irish mob. The private investigators know something about cold-blooded retribution. Born and bred on the mean streets of

NoirCrimeFirst Person NarratorMale Lead
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Galveston

Nic Pizzolatto · 272 pages

After being diagnosed with lung cancer, Roy Cady kills the men hired by his loan shark boss to kill him, and flees to Galveston, Texas with a prostitute and her young sister, where they face more problems.

NoirCrimeFirst Person NarratorMale Lead
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Nineteen Seventy Four

David Peace · 295 pages

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Blood on Snow

Jo Nesbo · 207 pages

Oslo, 1970s. Olav, an extremely talented "fixer" whose unexpected capacity for love is as far-reaching as his talent for murder, works for Oslo's crime kingpin, "fixing" anyone who causes him trouble. But it's becoming clear to Olav that the more you know about your boss's business, the more your boss might want you fixed yourself, especially if you've fallen in love with his wife.

NoirCrimeFirst Person NarratorMale Lead
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