Friday, October 22, 2021

Eight noir novels featuring saps & suckers

Gregory Galloway is the author of the novels The 39 Deaths of Adam Strand and the Alex Award-winning As Simple As Snow. His short stories have appeared in the Rush Hour and Taking Aim anthologies. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Galloway's new novel is Just Thieves.

At CrimeReads Galloway tagged eight "favorite noirs of characters in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong idea, thinking everything will be alright," including:
Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham

William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley (1946) is about as grim as they come, and almost as grim as Gresham’s real life (which provided some of the material for his novel).

Stan Carlisle thinks he can do better than work in a carnival, he might even think he’s better than the strongman, the fortuneteller, geek, and other performers. Stan thinks he can make it to the big time, and uses almost everyone he meets as another rung up the ladder of his success. He becomes the Great Stanton, conning the unsuspecting rich out of their money with a phony mentalist act, until he runs his grift on the wrong guy. Running from his mistakes and the people he’s wronged, Stanton falls back down the ladder, winding up exactly where he started. Well, actually lower, much lower.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue