Five best books on film noir

Barry Forshaw's books include British Crime Writing: An Encyclopedia and The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction, along with books on Italian cinema, and a biography of Stieg Larsson, The Man Who Left Too Soon.

At FiveBooks he told Anna Blundy about the best books on film noir, including:

The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 by Andrew Sarris.

This is the book that kick-started appreciation of film noir. It’s a massively influential book that introduced the ‘auteur’ theory into English writing. Sarris made us take the key directors seriously, as well as the genre itself. The French had already been taking popular genres seriously for years, but this was the book that ignited the touch paper here.

Before you start talking about this book, could you actually define film noir for me?

Film noir is a genre that had no definition in its own day other than ‘crime film’. All of those who were making films noirs, such as Robert Mitchum and similar great stars and directors of that era, wouldn’t have called what they were working on film noir. They were making crime movies and dramas. So, the title ‘film noir’ defines the moment when we started to take such films seriously and it was given a French moniker because that nation was the first to grant it serious academic attention.

The films were made largely in the 1940s, which is the defining period, and they’re steeped in all the imagery we know so well – crisp black and white photography, the glistening rain-swept streets, the femme fatale with the marcel wave smoking in a bar, and the hero who’s going to end up in a bad way if he’s seduced by her. It’s interesting that film noir has so many female followers, because it’s not a progressive genre when it comes to women. Either they’re the repository of all that’s good and they stay at home, or they are the dangerously attractive femme fatale and the hero ends up dead after having sex with them.

Tell me about the book now.

Sarris is a writer you will pick up if you have any love or appreciation for cinema. You will be inspired by the book – and you will also be throwing it across the room, because, along with the great enthusiasms and the famous pecking order of directors, he has some notable blind spots. There are directors like Hitchcock, of course, who are canonised, but Sarris writes off film-makers who are now held in very high esteem, such as Stanley Kubrick, who made one of the very best films noirs, The Killing. But the book takes the genre seriously and suggests we can look at these films in the same way as ‘art cinema’ directors such as Fellini and Bergman, who were automatically taken seriously. It was an incredibly influential book. People like me almost started writing film criticism because of this book.

Do you agree with him about Stanley Kubrick?

No, not at all, and I spend most of my time disagreeing with him when reading the book. Andrew Sarris was talking about people like Otto Preminger, who was basically considered to be a studio director, but for Sarris the director is the absolute king and this is now a contentious issue. If you look at Otto Preminger’s wonderful film Laura, the screenplay and the acting are vitally important. So there needed to be a redressing. Things needed to settle down, but Sarris started the ball rolling with this book.

Read about the other books on the list.

See Forshaw's critic's chart of six American noir masters.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan Cheever's six favorite Massachusetts books

At The Week magazine, Susan Cheever — novelist, memoirist and author of a new biography of Louisa May Alcott — recommended her six favorite works produced by Alcott’s prolific Concord, Mass., circle.

One title on the list:

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Inspired by critic Margaret Fuller (a figure left out of many accounts of the Concord circle), Hawthorne wrote this thrilling story about a woman proudly raising her illegitimate child. Filled with false promises, predatory villains, and sexual aberration, Hawthorne’s story plumbs the depths of human perversity.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Scarlet Letter is on John Mullan's list of ten of the best reformations in literature and among Paul Auster's five most important books.

Read about Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography by Susan Cheever.

Check out Cheever's favorite books and her five best list of books about obsession.

Visit Susan Cheever's official website, and see the Page 69 Test results for American Bloomsbury.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jess Walter's 5 favorite novels about job loss

Jess Walter is the author of five novels—including The Financial Lives of the Poets, which was just released in paperback, and The Zero, a 2006 National Book Award finalist—and one nonfiction book.

At the Daily Beast, he named five great novels about people losing their jobs. One title on the list:

The Ax
by Donald E. Westlake

After 25 years with the same paper company, Burke Devore lost his job following a merger. Two years later, he’s still looking for work and on the verge of desperation when the perfect position opens in New York. But 52-year-old middle managers aren’t especially sought-after, and so, in this dark and comic revenge fantasy, Devore decides to murder the other potential job candidates. Westlake’s straightedge humor keeps the unlikely plot running and a healthy dose of the mystery genre’s requisite plot twists and surprises keep the pages turning; the result is kind of like The Office meets Dexter. Westlake, the prolific author who died in 2008, wrote crisp, unassuming prose and reveals a CEO’s knack for streamlined efficiency himself by combining his protagonist and antagonist into a single position.

Read about the other novels on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books on the secrets of espionage

Jonathan Miles is the author, most recently, of The Dangerous Otto Katz: The Many Lives of a Soviet Spy.

For the Wall Street Journal, he named a five best list of books on the secrets of espionage.

One title on the list:

A Perfect Spy by John le Carré (1986)

Although a novel, "A Perfect Spy" reveals some deep truths about espionage and betrayal. The book has some basis in the author's own experience—indeed, le Carré has described the writing of it as an act of self-psychotherapy. In passages devoted to the childhood of the book's hero, Magnus Pym, we witness the shaping of a future agent as the boy's loyalties are pulled between a flashy father and a victimized mother. Studying his father's skills as a con man, while eavesdropping on abuse and dereliction, the young Pym becomes the apparently perfect—yet tragically imperfect—spy. In his split narrative, le Carré gives us a gripping manhunt even as he offers a work of penetrating psychology in which the soul of the hero is the contested territory.

Read about the other books on Miles's list.

A Perfect Spy is one of Philip Pullman's forty favorite books.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 10 best illustrated children’s books

At the Observer, Kate Kellaway named the finest picture books for youngsters.

One title on the list:

The Cat in the Hat
Dr Seuss (1957)

Dr Seuss is the most successful American picture book illustrator of all time. His motto “fun is good” is worth remembering. But the cat in the hat is a complicated character. He enters with his eyes peculiarly closed. His hat bends as if it were alive. There is something sinister beneath the bonhomie – and the RSPCA should be on to him for the way he treats that fish. And as to Thing One and Thing Two, they may help with the housework but they are a creepy duo. The power of the book is that it exists on the edge of children’s panic. Extraordinary to discover it was originally written as a school reader, a “controlled vocabulary book.”

Read about the other books on the list.

Also see Jim Bob's top ten illustrated books for adults.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best fishing trips

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best fishing trips in literature.

One book on the list:

The Shipping News by Annie Proulx

Quoyle flees to Newfoundland and comes to rest in Killick-Claw, a town on the edge of the Atlantic suffused with the tang of fish. He works for the local newspaper, whose editor calls in sick almost every day so that he can go fishing. Quoyle is slowly reborn, finding out all about love and cod fishing.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Shipping News appears among Elise Valmorbida's top ten books with a happy ending.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books on the rise and fall of America

Patrick Porter is a Senior Lecturer in the Defence Studies Department. His first book is Military Orientalism: Eastern War through Western Eyes.

With Daisy Banks at FiveBooks, he discussed his top books on the rise and fall of America. One of the titles:

The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present by Christopher Layne

Your last book is The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present by Christopher Layne.

This is a fascinating book, written in 2006 by an American political scientist, and he asks a simple but difficult question. If you look at the traditional metrics, whether geopolitical or military or economic, America should be and should know that it is one of the safest great powers the world has ever known. Since 1900 it has been one of the most secure great powers in history and yet why does it have this restless foreign policy? Why does it involve itself in entanglements and commitments abroad and avoidable wars?

He offers a very strong answer, and that is that America is driven by a liberal ideology – this notion that the world can be transformed in positive ways by American powers, and by doing so America can be made more secure. When I say liberal I don’t mean liberal in the way that a lot of people think of the word – anything which is desirable and good. I mean liberal as a deliberate ideology about progress and the role of America in the world and how it can be made safer, more prosperous, free and liberalised and emancipated by the positive application of American power. Liberalism can be a muscular and evangelical thing. In fact a liberal is often quite intolerant because they want to change things so they can be in line with liberal ideals, unlike, say, a realist, who can be much more tolerant and accommodating of a tyrannical regime than liberals. And it is this ideologically intense view of America’s interests that, Layne argues, powers its interventionist and expansionist urges, and explains a lot of America’s behaviour.

But then he goes on to argue that America doesn’t have to be this way and it can adopt other roles in the world, and in exchange for its role of global cop it can become an off-shore balancer – that is an off-shore power that has the ability to intervene occasionally in the world to protect itself but is much more restrained and keeps a ‘free hand’. And this actually shifts the burden of security on to other regional powers like India and the EU. This is an alternative vision for America’s place in the world.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books every prison should stock

Avi Steinberg's memoir is Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian.

In The Week magazine he named six books every prison should stock.

One title on the list:

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Nobody understood captivity like Kafka. The Metamorphosis gets at the essence of imprisonment. The experience of waking up in a cell in a prison uniform for the first time is not at all dissimilar to Gregor Samsa’s waking to find himself transformed into a “gigantic insect.”

Read about the other titles on the list.

The Metamorphosis is one of Thomas Bloor's top 10 tales of metamorphosis.

See Avi Steinberg's list of what Lindsay Lohan should read in jail.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elmore Leonard's ten favorite books

Elmore Leonard picked his ten favorite books for a special feature on the audible.com website called “A Life in Books: Authors & the Literature that Shaped Them.” He explains:

My ten favorite books represent a love and appreciation of reading, which goes back to when I read All Quiet on the Western Front when I was 10.When I decided to become a writer, Hemingway was my model, his spare prose and realistic dialogue. But he had no sense of humor and I discovered Richard Bissell who did. With Higgins it was, “Oh, that’s how you do it.” The rest of the works are by people who have given me the most pleasure and know how to write. Writers with such unique sounds that I better not read them when I’m writing, saving them for the time between books.

Three books on the list:

Bang the Drum Slowly By Mark Harris
For Whom the Bell Tolls By Ernest Hemingway
No Country for Old Men By Cormac McCarthy

Read about the other seven books to make the grade.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher Timothy's 6 best books

The actor Christopher Timothy is best known for starring as vet James Herriot in the hit TV drama All Creatures Great And Small.

He named his six best books for the Daily Express.

One title on the list:

The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth

I enjoyed the film, then read the book and loved it. Its clinical, detailed style takes us step by step to its (inevitable?) conclusion.

I’m not over enamoured with thrillers in general but this is truly exceptional.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best spas in literature

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best spas in literature.

One title on the list:

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

This Edwardian tragedy begins with the meeting of two apparently strait-laced couples, the Americans John and Florence Dowell, and English Edward and Leonora Ashburnham, in the German spa town of Nauheim. It is "a special heart cure place", where Dowell has travelled because of his wife's infirmity. But her relationship with Ashburnham will suggest that the waters have more than invigorated her.

Read about the other titles on the list.

The Good Soldier also appears on Mullan's lists of ten of the best failed couplings in literature and ten great novels with terrible original titles, and the Guardian's list of ten of the best unconsummated passions in fiction.

The Page 99 Test: The Good Soldier.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best fantasy novels not just for the young

Salman Rushdie's most recent novel is Luka and the Fire of Life.

He named a five best list of fantasy novels not just for the young. One entry on the list:

The Golden Compass
by Philip Pullman (1995)

Any book that begins with the death of God is OK by me. I love Philip Pullman's fabulist world of familiar spirits, "daemons" and magic "dust," his journey from a notably weird Oxford to flying cowboys, Nordic witches and giant, warrior polar bears. And under all the playfulness is a vision of a secular-humanist universe that has captured the imaginations of adult readers as well as youthful ones. This is an age polluted by much spiritualist and "holy" mumbo-jumbo and easy fanaticism; "The Golden Compass" and the rest of Pullman's "Dark Materials" trilogy are a powerful counterweight to all that claptrap and have the added benefit of really being fun to read.

Read about the other books on the list.

Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses is among Christopher Hitchens' six best books, Atul Gawande's favorite books, Karl O. Knausgaard's top ten angel books, and Diarmaid MacCulloch's five best books about blasphemy.

--Marshal Zeringue