Recommended reading - A Century of Noir: Thirty-two Classic Crime Stories:

 

A Century of Noir: Thirty-two Classic Crime Stories

A Century of Noir: Thirty-two Classic Crime Stories
Edited by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collines
Published 2002
 
ISBN-10: 0451205960
ISBN-13: 978-0451205964
 
Anthology of short stories.
 
Description:
 

Bleak streets and bleaker futures. Trapped heroes and desperate shreds of hope. Wicked women and broken dreams. Urban whirlpools and inexorable fates. Call it noir. Call it pulp. Call it black – and blue. It’s a tradition – tough, reckless, and uncompromising – born from the fierce imaginations of a century of writers with a unique talent for creating shadows out of words and turning raw emotion into pure poetry.

 

And this is noir at its incomparable best – thirty-two of the finest crime stories of the twentieth century, personally chosen by Shamus Award winner Max Allan Collins and Mickey Spillane, one of the true masters of hard-boiled fiction.