(Other than Garrison Keillor’s Guy Noir, that is.) This thread about Mickey Spillane got me thinking: I haven’t seen a new hardboiled-detective novel since John D. MacDonald passed away. Is it a dead genre?
There’s a new generation of writers. I took a writing class from Seth Harwood. He teaches through Stanford’s Continuing Studies online classes. Seth serialized his writing through a website and podcasts. This built interest in his series and lead to a publisher.
Seth still lets readers use podcasts to catch other installments. He’s revising the second book and it will be published soon.
Seth has also taught seminars on using the internet to get published and build a fan base.
Robert Crais? Charlie Huston? Dennis LeHane? David Corbett?
IMHO, James Ellroy is terrific, in particular L.A Confidential and American Tabloid.
It is over a decade old, but I recomment Jonathan Lethem’s Gun with Occasional Music for brilliant 1984-meets-hardboiled sci-fi noir.
Or Kelly Link’s short stories about The Girl Detective…
Ed Gorman and Lawrence Block - especially the latter’s Matt Scudder series.
oh, and if you haven’t read The Hustler- read it yesterday. It is an older book but just amazing…
Check out the books being put out under the marque Hard Case Crime:
Hard-boiled detectives are back!
IMHO, Ellroy’s a mess. I read L.A. CONFIDENTIAL because I liked the movie, and the plot was repetitious (and redundant), the prose was slovenly and wordy and verbose, the characters were flat and ill-motivated, and the book was endless (literally–I couldn’t finish it–I skimmed the last 100 or so pages.)