Let's talk about The Long Goodbye! No, seriously, let's! Chandler, Noir, Femme Fatales (three!), what more could you ask for? There is something so sexy and so misogynistic about noir all at once. Yeesh.
This is a genre about which my feelings are quite mixed, as the crazy paragraph above probably shows. That said, I liked this one significantly more than I had expected to. I think The Big Sleep is better, but this one came together when I wasn't sure that it could. Normally I have a really hard time following noir (it's the coincidences and the whole, let's just kick something and see if something happens method; I don't understand it), but with this one it worked for me; the coincidences worked.
It's always interesting to read one of these versus watching a movie. The authors could get away with so much that they couldn't if it were a film made during the era of the Code. That really came through with this one, and it always catches me a bit off guard.
Anyway, mixed feelings about the genre, but worth a read I'd say. Interestingly, noir is a genre I have a really, really hard time writing in; I can fake most styles, but noir is hard for me.
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