Yet for many Noir aficionados, You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up remains one of the most evocative and subversive novels of it's time. No mean feat when you consider it's back room competitors ; Cain's Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses Don't They ? and I Should Have Stayed Home, A.I Bezzerides The Long Haul, John Fante's Ask the Dust or Chandler's The Big Sleep. But as incisive as those novels are, none is quite as audacious or packs quite the same punch as You Play the Black.
..... as Hallas to distill so many of the hardboiled tropes - the drifter, unfulfilled desire, misplaced guilt, a greed-ridden culture, street-level perspective - into a coherent, if kaleidoscopic whole.
Snappy and Reckless ; Richard Hallas's "You Play the Black
and the Red Comes Up"
LA Review of Books
2011
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