Instant Enemy

Clogging the Air

        The summer heat of the valley came up to meet us as we circled in. Heat lay like a fine ash on the rubbish lots and fields and half-built suburbs, slowing the tiny cars on the roads and boulevards, clogging the air.

The Moving Target
Ross MacDonald
1949

There's No Way

       Try listening to yourself sometime, alone in a transient room in a strange town. The worst is when you draw a blank and the ash-blonde ghosts of the past carry on long twittering long-distance calls with your inner ear, and there's no way to hang up.

Ross MacDonald

Doomsters

It Reminded Me

        The smile that folded the puffed eyelids and creased the sagging cheeks and was fixed and forced. I'd seen such smiles in mortuaries on the false face of death. It reminded me that i was going to grow old and die.

Ross MacDonald
Moving Target
1949

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Roads I Knew

         The Red Barn was a many-windowed building which stood in the centre of a blacktop lot. It's squat pentagonal structure was accentuated by neon tubing along the eaves and corners. Inside his brilliant red cage, a tall-hatted short-order cook kept several waitresses running between his counter and the cars in the lot. The waitresses wore red uniforms and little red caps which made them look like bellhops in skirts. The blended odors of gasoline fumes and frying grease changed in my nostrils to a foolish old hot-rod sorrow, nostalgia for other drive-ins along roads i knew in pre-war places before people started dying on me.

The Doomsters
Ross MacDonald
1958

The Only Sound

https://fragmentsofnoirblog.tumblr.com/archive

Way Some People Die

https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2015/06/16/the-way-some-people-die-by-ross-macdonald/

Jordan Cronweth

Blade Runner

Cutters Way

Nickel Ride

State of Grace

In Cold Blood

Harper

Even Bad Luck is Some Kind of Luck #84

Le Trou

The Two Jakes

In Cold Blood

Devil in a Blue Dress

It Always Rains on Sundays

Harper

Kafka

Killing of a Chinese Bookie

Whirlpool

Rear Window

Girl on the Run

The Deuce

Odds Against Tomorrow

Plein Soleil

Phantom Lady

All Time Noir Detectives

Phillip Marlowe   Raymond Chandler
Hoke Mosely   Charles Willeford
Continental Op   Dashiell Hammett
Lew Archer   Ross MacDonald
Dave Robicheaux   James Lee Burke

Matthew Scudder   Lawrence Block
Easy Rawlins    Walter Mosley
Mitch Tobin   Tucker Coe (Donald Westlake)
Coffin Ed Johnson & Gravedigger Jones   Chester Himes

Detective Sergeant   Derek Raymond
Fritz Brown   James Ellroy
Cody   James Reasoner
Lew Griffin   James Sallis

runners - up
Maigret   Georges Simenon
Bernie Gunther  Phillip Kerr
The Eye   Marc Behm
Jacob Asch  Arthur Lyons
John Marshall Tanner  Stephen Greenleaf

Suggestions ?

Paul Newman

The Verdict

Absence of Malice

 The Hustler

Color of Money

Road to Perdition

 Harper

Cool Hand Luke

Drowning Pool

Twilight

The False Face

       The smile that folded the puffed eyelids and creased the sagging cheeks was fixed and forced. I'd seen such smiles in mortuaries on the false face of death. It reminded me that i was going to grow old and die.

Ross MacDonald
The Moving Target
1949

image
Gallmeister -
The Drowning Pool

Shortcut to Hell #8

Touch of Evil

Vertigo

Night and the City

Gloria

The Sniper

The Set Up

The Verdict

Blast of Silence

Salton Sea

Fallen Angel

Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call New Orleans

Key Largo

The Drowning Pool

The Big Combo

Friends of Eddie Coyle

Rififi

Mulholland Falls

The Unfaithful

Postman Always Rings Twice

 Sunset Boulevard

Blood Simple

Pale Flower

Carol

Double Indemnity

Taxi Driver

Moonrise

Chinatown

The Killing

Le Cercle Rouge

A Man Escaped

They Shoot Horses Don't They