Greetings

It’s such a pleasure to contribute to The Rap Sheet. Everyone has their story of finding the book, movie, or other artifact that somehow spoke to them, becoming a permanent influence or touchstone, and for me it was first uncovering the gritty and glamorous world of film noir. These were among the first movies I saw as a kid, sitting in front of the television on Saturday mornings. First, I came upon the canonical, especially Double Indemnity, which has a deathless power to transfix me (and countless others) to this day. From there, I fumbled my way through Out of the Past and Gilda towards Detour, Black Angel, Phantom Lady, The Locket, Fallen Angel, and on and on. Other than an adolescence-born love of James Ellroy, I didn’t come upon hard-boiled or noir fiction until graduate school, when I picked up a copy of The Postman Always Rings Twice and, as they say, I was hooked for life. As a means of justifying my reader’s tour through the hard-boiled and noir canon, I decided to write my dissertation on the subject and, eventually, still lovestruck, tried my hand at a novel in that vein myself. I’d imagine the source of my fascination is the source of many fans’.

For me, hard-boiled and noir both bring to life a corner of my imagination that, theretofore, I thought was mine alone. The world they paint may not be, exactly (Chandler to the contrary) the world we live in, but it’s a world we carry inside, a world of dark alleys, low ceilings, the faint sound of ice cubes and swooning jazz slipping under doorways, the weight of the past heavy in every step, the sense of danger, doom, and helpless love around every corner.