Recently, I started a discussion here on Crimespace. I posed this question: Is there a place for humor in a hard-boiled thriller/noir? The answers I got were mixed, but there was a hesitancy that trended towards “No.” One Crimespacer quoted Otto Penzler – “Noir requires a sense of bleakness and despair, and characters so flawed, their failure is in their DNA.”

Maybe I’m…

In Prague, I lived in a building a lot like the one(s) in this photo from The Third Man.  Not enough light; the faucets barely worked; there was a weird film poster of “Nanuk of the North” left behind by the previous tenant.  And I mean weird.  Like a cockamamie merger of Eskimo soft-porn and man and dog buddy adventure.   But I loved that place, and it still gives me…

If you’re here and reading this, you probably have a thing for noir.  I know I do.  I love its style – the tipped fedoras, the fitted clothes. I love that a cigarette is more than a prop – it’s treated like a piece of jewelry.

But in the few short years after the end of the WWII, when cool was being codified, Hitchcock's blondes were running amok, and French noir was…