Top Twenty Hardboiled/Noir

     Here's the books i would nominate as my favourites. Some a little bit left-field and loosely fitting in terms of the Hardboiled or Noir fiction label.

Friends of Eddie Coyle- Geo V Higgins
Postman Always Rings Twice- James M Cain
The Grifters- Jim Thompson
The Hunter- Richard Stark
Long Goodbye- Raymond Chandler
Street 8- Douglas Fairbairn
New Hope for the Dead- Charles Willeford
The Getaway- Jim Thompson
Fat City- Leonard Gardner
Unknown Man no-89- Elmore Leonard
Red Harvest- Dashiell Hammett
They Shoot Horses Don't They- Horace McCoy
The Burglar- David Goodis
Nightmare Alley- William Lindsay Gresham
In Cold Blood- Truman Capote
Fast One- Paul Cain
Asphalt Jungle- WR Burnett
Pick up- Charles Willeford
Cool hand Luke- Donn Pearce
The Hustler- Walter Tevis

          There's some obvious others lurking in the shadows, around the edges .... like James Lee Burke, Chester Himes, Ellroy, Pelecanos, Woolrich, Lawrence Block, Ross MacDonald, Walter Moseley, Jason Starr, Derek Raymond and some one-offs like Falling Angel- Hjortsberg, Black Wings Has My Angel, True Confessions and You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up.