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American noir detective fiction

In my new book, Catch You Lat­er, Trai­tor, my pro­tag­o­nist, Pete, lives out his fas­ci­na­tion with Amer­i­can noir detec­tive fic­tion. In par­tic­u­lar he admires Sam Spade, the gumshoe hero cre­at­ed by Dashiell Ham­mett in his book, The Mal­tese Fal­con. In the course of my sto­ry, Pete now and again slips into noir fic­tion style to describe the world and sit­u­a­tion in which he lives. 

Dime Detective MagazineThe front room of Ritman’s store was filled with rotat­ing wire racks stuffed with paper­back books, comics, and mag­a­zines. I head­ed for the back room, which has the old detec­tive mag­a­zines. I loved those mys­tery month­lies, ones like Black Mask, Dime Detec­tive, and Ellery Queen’s Mys­tery Mag­a­zine. Their cov­ers always had some radio-active babe falling out of her dress next to a square-jawed guy about to either save her or kill her, it was­n’t clear which. The sto­ries were full of hard guys in hard sit­u­a­tions with hard bad guys and dames, talk­ing in such hard ways it would take a chis­el to break their sen­tences apart.

Catch You Later, TraitorI adored writ­ing those sec­tions. I think there is some­thing unique­ly Amer­i­can in that noir voice. The tough love. The sar­casm. The wit. The truth telling. The very care­ful lit­er­ary con­struc­tion, all of which masks a deeply root­ed sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty, an embar­rassed, if you will, search­ing for love. Very com­plex. As a kid, I found the style fas­ci­nat­ing. Still do. The thought that I can share this—introduce it—to my read­ers gives me great pleasure.

In Catch You Lat­er, Trai­tor, the noir tone is a key part of the nov­el. The truth is, if the writer is lucky, he or she loves writ­ing a book. I loved writ­ing this one. I hope you will love read­ing it.

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