Your Monday Moment of Noir

"But now everything was quiet. As far as the eye could reach there was nothing moving, nothing to be seen that had life or power of death. Just the two roads, one dirt and one black top, the desert, the mountains and behind him the frame shacks of the country store. There was an old shed near the sedan, and Danny looked behind it. A car would have parked there without being seen, but there were too many tracks to tell the story."

Detour
by Helen Nielsen
(Black Lizard, 1988; originally published 1953)

Your Monday Moment of Noir

"Lenore has killed one person—a twenty-two-year-old Colombian who fired a shotgun at Zarelli from the shattered back window of a speeding Trans Am—and wounded three others in varying degrees of severity, including blowing the full right arm off a longtime smack broker from down the projects who made the mistake of charging her with a razor in a dark stairwell. In each of those incidents, Lenore has felt a burst of emotion that she can't put a name to, that has no definition in the heart of the average person. She approximates it every time she pulls out her weapon and draws down on a suspect without firing. It's not the same as actually pulling the trigger, but it's a step in the right direction and more pleasing than frustrating."

Box Nine
by Jack O'Connell
(Mysterious Press, 1992)

Your Monday Moment of Noir

Her hands had fallen still, and she looked up at me blankly, then said quietly, "You're a rather profane and unhappy man, aren't you?"

"Lady, I'm worse than that," I said as I sat down.


The Wrong Case
by James Crumley
(Random House, 1975)

Your Monday Moment of Noir

"Now, turning the Polaroid snap over and over in his fingers, Blaze felt empty. He felt like when he looked up in the sky and saw the stars, or a bird on a telephone wire or chimbly with its feathers blowing. George was gone and he was still stupid. He was in a fix and there was no way out. Unless maybe he could show George he was at least smart enough to get this thing rolling. Unless he could show George he didn't mean to get caught. Which meant what? Which meant diapers. Diapers and what else? Jesus, what else? He fell into a doze of thought. He thought all that morning, which passed with snow whooping in its throat."

Blaze
by Stephen King, writing as Richard Bachman
(Scribner, 2007)

Your Monday Moment of Noir

"With this CD and the four previous ones behind it, Huey Lewis and the News prove that if this really is a small world, then these guys are the best American band of the 1980s on this or any other continent—and it has with it Huey Lewis, a vocalist, musician and writer who just can't be topped."

American Psycho
by Bret Easton Ellis
(Vintage Contemporaries, 1991)

Your Monday Moment of Noir

"I pop two Nurofen and wash them down with a bottle of warm water. As I pull into the carpark, I see a fat child screaming her way down a slide shaped like an elephant. Her dad, a Pringle sweater with the look of a fortnight father about him, sups a pint of real ale and watches her out the corner of his eye. Sunday drinking. Warm and relaxed, even though the skies are streaked grey and back. Outward respectability when a storm is brewing."

Saturday's Child
by Ray Banks
(Polygon, 2006)

This one comes with Secret Dead Blog's highest recommendation. And while it's been available in the UK for a while now, Saturday's Child makes its American hardcover debut today. Yes, today. Get your arse to a bookseller, stat.

Your Monday Moment of Noir

"One day Bell said, 'I can stand it no longer,' and he rushed me like a famished tiger, at the same time attempting to strike me with his gun. I parried the blow and killed him with a hatchet. I then cut his flesh into strips which I carried with me as I pursued my journey. When I espied the Agency from the top of the hill, I threw away the strips I had left, and I confess I did so reluctantly as I had grown fond of human flesh, especially that portion around the breast."

The Thin Man
by Dashiell Hammett
(Knopf, 1934)

Happy New's Eve, everybody!

Your Monday Moment of Noir (Holiday Edition)

"He lay, in the dark empty house, with not a man, a woman, or a child, to say that he was kind to me in this or that, and for the memory of one kind word I will be kind to him. A cat was tearing at the door, and there was a sound of gnawing rats beneath the hearth-stone. What they wanted in the room of death, and why they were so restless and disturbed, Scrooge did not dare to think.

'Spirit,' he said, 'this is a fearful place. In leaving it, I shall not leave its lesson, trust me. Let us go.'

Still the Ghost pointed with an unmoved finger to the head."

A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
(December 1843)

Your Monday Moment of Noir

"All day the rain poured down on the Bronx without mercy. The sewers overflowed and the waters rose over the curbs of the street. The tenement at No. 55 Dropsie Avenue seemed ready to rise and float away on the swirling tide. "Like the ark of Noah," it seemed to Frimme Hersh as he sloshed homeward. Only the tears of ten thousand weeping angels could cause such a deluge And, come to think of it, maybe that is exactly what it was... after all, this was the day Frimme Hersh buried Rachele, his daughter."

A Contract With God
by Will Eisner
(Baronet Press, 1978)

Your Monday Moment of Noir

"He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin. Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for building itself would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then, naturally, he himself would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate as he stood here in his stricken living room alone with the lungless, all-penetrating, masterful world-silence.

Better, perhaps, to turn the TV back on."

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
a.k.a. Blade Runner
by Philip K. Dick
(Doubleday, 1968)

Your Monday Moment of Noir

"He hadn't been drinking. He was sober. He hadn't been out listening to jazz. He'd spent the night in the desert of his bed. A subway station, black and metallic, stood in the middle of the intersection. At last a yellow cab pulled up to the sidewalk and a dozen nightclub patrons rushed in its direction. Not without difficulty, the cab drove off again, empty. Perhaps nobody was going the right way. Two wide streets, almost deserted, with garlands of luminous globes running down the sidewalks. On the corner, its high windows lit violently, aggressively, with boastful vulgarity, was a sort of long glass cage where people could be seen as dark smudges and where he went in just so as not to be alone."

Trois Chambres à Manhattan
by Georges Simenon
(Presses de la Cité, 1946)

Your Monday Moment of Noir

"I felt calm as I followed the hedgerow back to the river. My crepe-soled shoes left no mark on the frozen ground. There was no way they could trace me; nobody was even aware that I knew her. She made number ten. I searched myself for elation and found none. It was like reaching into a cookie jar and finding nothing. I was empty."

The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed
by Charles Runyon
(Gold Medal, 1965)

Now available, along with Dan J. Marlowe's The Vengeance Man and Fletcher Flora's Park Avenue Tramp in Stark House's cool new collection, A Trio of Gold Medals. Secret Dead Blog highly recommends.

Your Monday Moment of Noir

He'd only been back for two weeks, but he already felt the familiarity seeping back into his bones. The memories of the back alleys and train tracks running like a vein through his mind. This was a hard place, a cold place. It felt like home. When he was in lock-up he'd read Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again. But Tracy thought the truth was you could never really leave it...

Criminal #6
by Ed Brubaker
(Icon, Marvel 2007)

Your Monday Moment of Noir

"Remembering, out of the black silence. You were born in pain... You were born with hate and anger built in. Took a slap on the backside to blast out the scream. And then you knew you were alive. Eight pounds, five ounces. Baby boy Frankie Bono. Father doing well. Later you learned to hold back the scream, and let the hate and anger out another way..."

Blast of Silence
written and directed by Allen Baron
(Universal Pictures, 1961)

Special thanks to Ed Brubaker for turning me on to this forgotten noir classic.

Your Monday Moment of Noir

"I lay there, thinking about the sunset, trying to remember what color it was. I don't mean the red, I mean the other shades. Once or twice I almost remembered; it was like a name you once had known but now had forgotten, whose size and letters and cadence you remembered but could not quite assemble. Through the legs of my cot I could feel the ocean quivering against the pilings below. It rose and fell, rose and fell, went out and came back, went out and came back... I was glad when the siren blew, waking us up, calling us back to the floor."

They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
by Horace McCoy
(Simon & Schuster, 1935)

Your Monday Moment of Noir

"All at once he flung his cigarette down, with a long overhand shoulder-roll that had in it both exasperation and final, wearied capitulation. Even the paper of the cigarette had been a little soggy, made it difficult to draw on it satisfactorily. Abruptly he struck out from the doorway, started walking the long diagonal toward his own doorway—and the figure waiting in it so complacently, so sure that in the end he would have to do just this."

Fright
By George Hopley (Cornell Woolrich)
(Rinehart, 1950)

Note: Now available as a sweet new paperback from Hard Case Crime under Woolrich's own name.

Your Monday Moment of Noir

"Finally Hart climbed back into the cot, propped the pillows to make himself comfortable, sucked smoke into his mouth, filled himself up with the smoke and it seep out between this teeth.He wondered why he wasn't sick. He thought maybe he was beginning to get tough. He told himself it didn't really make any difference, because he didn't give a hang, but underneath he knew he did give a hang and it made a lot of difference and no matter what he kept telling himself he was really afraid of what was happening inside him."

Black Friday
By David Goodis
(Lion, 1954)

Your Monday Moment of Noir

"The winter came, and dragged right through, and went again. You knew it was winter because it was colder, and the skies when you saw them were nearly always covered over, and it got dark early. Those were the ways you had of knowing now. Those were the things prison couldn't hide from you. It could take everything else. It could take away your touch with life. It could stop you from seeing and hearing and feeling the pulse of the world. It could kill the inside of you. It could make you stay still when everything inside you was pushing you to get moving. It could make you move when everything inside you was tugging you to stay still."

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands
By Gerald Butler
(Dell, 1946)

Your Monday Moment of Noir

"Then I noticed an odd thing. The rain had started to bounce. It fell on the shiny black pavement and leaped into the air like tiny pellets of white shot. It had turned to sleet. That settled it. I was soaked all the way to the skin and I'd freeze to death before morning if I didn't get inside somewhere. A long-shot chance was better than none at all. I pulled the coat collar tighter about my face, yanked down the brim of my hat, and crossed the street."

Man on the Run
By Charles Williams
(Gold Medal, November 1958)