Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I Loved Laura, Except for . . .

Laura by Vera Caspary

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Another book from my personal challenge of reading the source material for favorite classic movies: Laura, by Vera Caspary. This book is a detective noir, as hard-boiled and cynical as any of the genre, but written by a woman. It was originally published, a la Dickens, as a serial, “Ring Twice for Laura,” in Colliers Magazine in 1942/43. The  classic film noir, starring Gene Tierney as Laura and Dana Andrews as a detective who finds himself falling in love with a dead woman as he […]

More Marlowe

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

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“Organized crime is just the dirty side of the sharp dollar.” “What’s the clean side?” “I never saw it. Let’s have a drink.” If quotes like that excite you, and you tend to view the world through a haze of cigarette smoke and gimlet fog, then this book could very well be for you. The Long Goodbye is Raymond Chandler’s sixth novel featuring the jaded private dick with a heart of…silver, Philip Marlowe. It’s not the best in the series, but it’s towards the top. […]

Civil War Noir

De Niro's Game by Rawi Hage

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Shortlisted for Canada’s biggest literary award, the Giller Prize, I’d heard a lot about DeNiro’s Game, in particular how it was the first novel for its author, Rawi Hage (Lainey Gossip would call him a First Book Bitch).  The novel tells the story of two childhood best friends, Bassam and George, who are living in Beirut in the 1980s civil war.  Written first-person from Bassam’s perspective, we watch the two young men take different paths, and respond in different ways, to the chaos engulfing their […]

Allow, if you’re still alive, six to eight years to arrive

Sunburn by Laura Lippman

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There’s something about a noir novel with the word ‘sun’ in its title. It’s coming to me now. Wait. It’s almost there. … Nope, it’s gone now. Anyway. It’s 1994. Two attractive strangers walk into a sleepy Delaware town. She is Polly, a redhead with a sunburn, who has just left her husband and three year old daughter; he is Adam, a PI, looking for a woman once known as Pauline. They meet in the town’s only bar. She finds work as a waitress, he […]

Psycho Killer, Qu’est-ce que c’est?

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes

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Dorothy B. Hughes was a popular crime writer of the 1940s and 1950s, perhaps the best female crime writer of her day and, based on the prose and psychological complexity on display in this slim volume, very much the equal of her better-known male peers. A very perceptive afterword written by the mystery novelist Megan Abbot does a better job elucidating the feminist aspects of the book than I could hope to, so let me just say that In A Lonely Place is a necessary […]

Luke Cage meets noir meets The Diviners meets more please!

Abbott by Saladin Ahmed, Sami Kivelä

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Abbott is a brief, five-issue series set in 1970s Detroit about journalist Elena Abbott, lone black female reporter at the Detroit Daily. Abbott prefers to delve into the stories the paper’s board would rather not see printed. She’s recently getting heat for her piece on the death of a black teen at the hands of police, but so far she’s been protected by her loyal boss. She has a new case on the horizon and it’s a grisly one.  A mutilated police horse is found […]



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