Behind The Glitz And Glamour:

7 Noir Books Set in Hollywood

It’s that time of year when all eyes turn to Hollywood: Oscar season. Speculation abounds as film fans wonder who will win a gold statuette, and what people will wear on the red carpet. Behind all the glitz and glamour, however, there’s a dark side. Tempers run high when money, fame, and love are at stake, and careers and heads take a tumble. For a behind-the-scenes perspective of the dark side of Tinseltown, Elisa Shoenberger recently compiled this list of seven books of noir-ish murder and mayhem in Hollywood. Here are three of the best:

The Little Sister, by Raymond Chandler: When Orfamay Quest asks Philip Marlowe to find her older brother Orrin, he hadn’t expected that a missing persons case would result in so much murder. As our hero keeps finding bodies with ice picks in their necks, he also finds himself in the middle of Hollywood blackmail...and the mob.

L.A. Confidential, by James Ellroy: Three cops find their fates intertwined when they brutalize a few prisoners after getting drunk at a Christmas party. They may not have much in common, but they find their cases intertwined in a world of corruption, drugs, mobsters, Hollywood starlets, and a whole lot of blackmail.

Die a Little, by Megan Abbott: Lora and her brother Bill lead very strait-laced jobs; she’s a schoolteacher, he’s an attorney. Plus, they only have each other as family. So when Bill falls for a Hollywood wardrobe assistant named Alice and marries her, Lora finds herself surprised, repulsed, and riveted with Alice’s life and her seemingly dark past.

The Inside Story Of The $8 Million

Heist From The Carnegie Library

Like nuclear power plants and sensitive computer networks, the safest rare book collections are protected by what is known as “defense in depth”—a series of small, overlapping measures designed to thwart a thief who might be able to overcome a single deterrent. The Oliver Room, home to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s rare books and archives, was something close to the bibliophile's ideal of this concept. Greg Priore, manager of the room starting in 1992, designed it that way.

Then, in 2017, the library’s administration was surprised to find that many of the room’s holdings were gone. According to Smithsonian magazine, It wasn’t just that a few items were missing. It was the most extensive theft from an American library in at least a century, with the value of the stolen objects estimated to be $8 million. The thief stole nearly everything of significant monetary value, including the oldest book in the collection, a collection of sermons printed in 1473, a first edition of Isaac Newton’s 98, a first edition of The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, a letter written by William Jennings Bryan, a first edition of a book written by the nation’s second president, John Adams, as well as a book signed by the third, Thomas Jefferson. From John James Audubon’s 1851-54 Quadrupeds of North America, he stole 108 of the 155 hand-colored lithographs.

In short, the thief took nearly everything he could get his hands on. And he did it with impunity for close to 25 years. He was: Greg Priore himself.

du Maurier’s Moody Jamaica Inn

Defines Gothic 1930s Film 30s

Mention the name Daphne du Maurier and most readers and filmgoers will mention the exquisitely written novel Rebecca, known for its secretive mansion Manderley and its effervescent and treacherous [and deceased] mistress of the house. But du Maurier wrote numerous other historical romance and suspense books—many of which were not at first taken seriously by critics—including the lesser-known Jamaica Inn. In a recent Crime Reads article, Patrice McDonough highlights this thriller as one of the best historical mysteries from the 1930s, published in '36 and adapted for film by Alfred Hitchcock in '39.

The plot: In early nineteenth-century Cornwall, the orphaned Mary Yellon arrives at the sinister Jamaica Inn to live with her aunt and uncle. Mary quickly realizes that nefarious doings are afoot. Is her uncle the leader of the wreckers who lure ships onto the rocky Cornish coast, killing the survivors who stagger ashore? Or is someone else the murderous mastermind?

In the movie version, “Hitchcock plays fast and loose with Daphne Du Maurier’s plot, but his atmospherics match the source’s Gothic suspense,” McDonough says. “In the film’s perpetual nighttime, tides don’t roll; they roar. Winds don’t blow; they howl. The shipwreck scenes look as if Hitchcock shot them in a bathtub, but no matter." Note: This was Hitchcock’s last British movie before moving on to Hollywood to shoot the aforementioned Rebecca, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine.

8 Exceptional Novels That Mix

Speculative Fiction And Noir

In one sense, noir is rooted in a very specific time and place. As Lincoln Michel recently wrote in Novel Suspects, “Noir sprang out of the hardboiled detective fiction that emerged in the United States around the Great Depression as the veneer was chipping off the mythic American dream. Prohibition had empowered organized crime, political corruption was rampant, and the gap between the poor in bread lines and the robber barons in gilded palaces was a growing chasm. The cynical antiheroes of such writers as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett spoke to that specific time.”

In another sense, however, noir is timeless and adaptable to any place, real or imagined. “Noir films and novels have been made in countries all over the world, and the style can be mashed up with almost any other genre,” Michel says. “Corruption, darkness, and mystery never seem to go away.” From Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, to Cassandra Khaw’s Hammers on Bone, to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep [the basis of the 1982 film Blade Runner, pictured left], he’s compiled a list of eight exceptional noir novels that just happen to take place in science fiction and fantasy worlds.

ICYMI: The British Trained Seagulls

To Locate Enemy Submarines In WWI

Anyone who’s ever brought food to the beach knows that seagulls are exceptional hunters when they want to be, a skill the British put to the test when they trained the scavenging seabirds to detect German submarines during World War I. This began in 1917, with Britain’s Board of Invention and Research living up to its name by setting up a fake periscope that would feed wild gulls. If all went well, their thinking went, the birds would associate the sight of a periscope peeking above the water with a tasty meal — and any British sailors who spotted a flock of seagulls hovering above what appeared to be empty water would know there was a U-boat in their midst.

It didn’t work, alas, as the birds knew no masters but themselves. A few soldiers had trouble abandoning the plan, however, as one admiral tried a different approach by teaching the seagulls to defecate on the submarine’s periscopes and blind the crew within. Meanwhile, the U.S. military considered its own version of the idea involving hand-raised birds from Lake Michigan, though neither effort moved forward. Seagulls are resourceful creatures, but it seems they’re more motivated to dive-bomb loose fries than enemy watercraft.

Coming March 19

Beyond All Doubt

[Reed Bunzel writing as Hilton Reed]

“Beyond All Doubt is an edge-of-your-seat fast-moving thrill-ride, kicked off by the reappearance of a dead man and propelling the reader along to the final bullet—and beyond.”— S.J. Rozan, best-selling author of The Mayors of New York

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“Beyond All Doubt is a taut, smart, and emotionally rich thriller. Reed has a sharp eye for character and a screenwriter's feel for action. This tale is sleek as a mink and fast as a bullet.”— T. Jefferson Parker, author of The Rescue

“Beyond All Doubt is not a 'who done it,' but a twisty, compelling 'who did what.' Cameron Kane is a sympathetic, yet unrelenting bulldog in his pursuit of the truth about his wife's death. Intriguing and intense, Beyond All Doubt is a winner!”—Matt Coyle, bestselling author of the Rick Cahill crime novels

“In this action-packed and engrossing thriller, Reed masterfully balances between a husband’s drive to uncover the truth about his wife’s death and a father’s instinct to protect his family at all costs. Once I started reading, I couldn’t put it down!”— Matthew Farrell, bestselling author of The Woman at Number 6

“Beyond All Doubt has plenty of thrills—deadly snipers, false identities, shocking deaths—but at its heart, this book is about a grieving single father whose desperation propels the plot like a speeding car with its brake lines cut.”— Cayce Osborne, author of I Know What You Did