Ten of the best noir novels

Ken Bruen is one of the most prominent Irish crime writers of the last two decades. One of his ten favorite noir novels, as shared at Publishers Weekly:

Dark Passage by David Goodis

Of special interest is how Goodis in 1946 sold the rights of this classic to Hollywood before it was even published. The movie tends to deflect from the remaining power of the novel, which is as fresh and dark today as then. Dark Passage has the same essential noir nucleus that would underwrite the noir template, a man unjustly imprisoned for the murder of his wife. If noir can be encapsulated within the narrow definition of bad things happening to a man and continuing to spiral down, then protagonist Vincent Parry is the very personification of this.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue