Pittsburgh has recently been called 'the most liveable city in America' - yet the old image of smoky skies and steel mills spewing forth grit has never quite disappeared. Its history as a dirty industrial centre is part of its inhabitants - and part of their toughness. The people of the steel city fight. What is Pittsburgh to noir and noir to Pittsburgh? It certainly has its rough streets and grisly murders. But dark crime stories depend on something in addition to killing. In Pittsburgh Noir, the real story is the dark underbelly of existence.

"Paris Noir fills a grievous gap in the absorbing chronicle of American expatriates who chose to live in Paris in the twentieth century. For alongside Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller was an avant-garde and tightly knit community of black American writers, artists, musicians, and political exiles who found in Paris the creative and personal freedom denied them back home." "A welcoming refuge for writers, Paris embraced Richard Wright, Chester Himes, James Baldwin, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay. A score of all-important jazz musicians lit up the city at night, from Miles Davis to Charlie Parker to Sidney Bechet, while Josephine Baker dazzled audiences with the Danse Sauvage in the Revue Negre. Leaving an equally important mark were the painters and artists who found inspiration in the Paris scene: Henry Ossawa Tanner, Lois Mailou Jones, Ed Clark, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Barbara Chase-Riboud." "Paris Noir brings this vibrant world to life, beginning with the doughboys who returned to Paris after World War I and moving on through the Jazz Age, the Depression, the years of the Harlem Renaissance, World War II, and the postwar boom."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Neon Noir, the follow-up to Woody Haut's highly regarded Pulp Culture, brings the story of American crime fiction and film uptodate. From the Kennedy assassination to the Vietnam War and Watergate, through Reaganomics to Irangate and Whitewater, Neon Noir is a roller-coaster ride through the American nightmare. Haut investigates the dark side of America through the work of crime writers such as James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard, Walter Mosley, James Lee Burke, Lawrence Block, James Sallis, George Pelecanos, Charles Willeford, Jerome Charyn, Sara Paretsky, Vicki Hendricks, KC Constantine, George V Higgins and James Crumley. Mapping the fissures and scars of America's psychogeography, its morally ambiguous shadowlands, Neon Noir also considers the difference between past and present hardboilers, the impact of war and journalism on noirists, the portrayal of cities, the aesthetics of crime fiction, and the changing relationship between the books and the films. Like Pulp Culture, Neon Noir is set to become the reference book on its subject.

Exploring classic examples of film noir such as The Asphalt Jungle, Double Indemnity, and The Naked City alongside many lesser-known works, Dimendberg confirms that noir is not simply a reflection of modernity but a virtual continuation of the spaces of the metropolis.

The term "film noir" was first applied by French critics to a number of American films that made their way to France over a period of six weeks at the end of World War II. These films-which included such soon-to-be classics as The Maltese Falcon; Murder, My Sweet; This Gun for Hire, and The Big Sleep-and the noirs that followed fascinated French moviegoers with their new breed of criminals: love-starved husbands and wives, local business owners, writers, gamblers, small-time hoods, private eyes, mental patients, war veterans, rebellious teenagers, and corrupt lawyers, politicians, judges and cops. Over 700 films from the classic period of film noir (1940 to 1959) are presented in this exhaustive reference book-such films as The Accused, Among the Living, The Asphalt Jungle, Baby Face Nelson, Bait, The Beat Generation, Crossfire, Dark Passage, I Walk Alone, The Las Vegas Story, The Naked City, Strangers on a Train, White Heat, and The Window. For each film, the following information is provided: the title, release date, main performers, screenwriter(s), director(s), type of noir, thematic content, a rating based on the five-star system, and a plot synopsis that does not reveal the ending.

According to many critics, the era of "Film Noir" ended with the 1958 release of Orson Welles' classic Touch of Evil. The style was not dead, but rather had been transformed, and two years later, Alfred Hitchcock ushered in a new era of "Noir" films with the release of his 1960 masterpiece, Psycho. Film scholar Ronald Schwartz examines the most significant representatives of this cinematic style, beginning with Hitchcock's shocker and concluding with Michael Mann's Collateral (2004). Schwartz provides in-depth analyses of over thirty of the best "Neo-Noir" films and explains the qualities and characteristics of the "new noir" style. He also explains how it differs from "Film Noir" of the forties and fifties. As this study reveals, the new style significantly impacted American film after 1960. In this chronological guide, Schwartz examines such landmark films as The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Point Blank (1967), The French Connection (1971), Chinatown (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), Body Heat (1981), Blood Simple (1984), Fatal Attraction (1987), The Grifters (1990), Reservoir Dogs (1992), The Usual Suspects (1995), L.A. Confidential (1997), Memento (2000), and Mystic River (2003). The book also includes an alphabetical filmography, listing over 650 films that in plot, style, or subject matter reflect the diversity of the genre. This reference work will be a valuable resource for film scholars and fans alike who wish to further explore the ever-evolving aspects of "Neo-Noir" cinema.