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Muller profiles six actresses central to the genre, Ann Savage, Jane Greer, Evelyn Keyes, Audrey Totter, Marie Windsor, and Coleen Gray, through interviews conducted before their deaths. The best book written about noir performers. Start here.

100 films, each given a full photographic essay with rare stills, poster art, and production notes. Introduction by Paul Schrader. The best single-volume visual reference for the genre. Beautifully produced. Lives on the shelf.

Essays, interviews, and criticism from the key noir scholars and writers. Covers films, novels, radio, and television. The best single-volume anthology of noir criticism. Dense, opinionated, and essential.

The standard reference work. Every significant film covered with cast, credits, and critical notes. Silver and Ward's encyclopaedia has been the starting point for serious noir research since 1979. The fourth edition is the current standard.

The best book on the cultural and urban context of film noir. Christopher reads the genre through the American city, its architecture, its geography, its social structures. Where to go after you've read the reference books.

Thirty key directors of the classic period, each given a biographical essay and analysis of their major noir work. Wilder, Preminger, Tourneur, Lang, Siodmak, Lewis, Ophüls and more. Lavishly illustrated.

The novel that established the hard-boiled detective. Sam Spade is more morally ambiguous on the page than Bogart's film allows. Hammett wrote the whole thing in a month in 1929. It has never dated.

The plot is incomprehensible in the novel too. It doesn't matter. Chandler's prose is the point, Los Angeles rendered as a moral landscape, every sentence placing you in a world where corruption runs straight through from the gutter to the penthouse.

The novella is leaner and crueller than the film. Cain strips everything to bone, the plan, the execution, the unravelling. Walter Huff (Neff in the film) is less sympathetic. Phyllis is worse. Read it after you've seen the film.

The novel that launched Cain's career and the French New Wave's obsession with American crime fiction. Frank and Cora are more desperate on the page. The ending is bleaker. It takes two hours to read and stays with you for years.

The second Marlowe novel and the best. The source for Murder My Sweet. Chandler at the height of his powers, a missing person case, a stolen necklace, a gambler's club, and a woman who ties it all together. The plot holds.

Woolrich is the most anxious writer in noir, every page generates dread from situations that should be ordinary. A man condemned to death. An alibi witness who can't be found. One of the genre's great novels of pure suspense.

The Criterion edition. Restored 4K digital transfer supervised by Paramount. Commentary by Richard Schickel. The template for everything that followed, in the best available home presentation.

The most beautiful film in the noir canon, in a restoration that finally does justice to Nicholas Musuraca's cinematography. Mitchum at his best. The Criterion edition includes an essay by Geoffrey O'Brien.

Criterion's 2020 release of Huston's masterwork. Harold Rosson's cinematography, slick wet streets and deep shadow, has never looked better. Includes a conversation with a young Marilyn Monroe about her small but memorable role.

Made in six days on next to nothing. The most purely fatalistic film in American cinema. The Criterion restoration is a small miracle, a film that looked ragged for decades now looks as Ulmer intended.

The Dark Mirror, Secret Beyond the Door, Force of Evil, and The Big Combo. Four films that belong in any serious collection, in one Arrow box set with commentaries from leading scholars. Exceptional value.

The last great film of the classic era and the one that blew it up. Aldrich's fever dream adaptation of Mickey Spillane goes somewhere no other noir went. The Criterion restoration was long overdue and worth the wait.