Official Selection:
This month's theme is NOIR - specifically noir by women authors. Megan Abbott's doctorate was based on literary noir of the 40's and 50's, and no other contemporary writer has managed to capture that style so accurately in their own work. The Song is You, Megan's second book, is based on the true story of Jean Spangler, a Hollywood starlet who disappeared in the 1940's. Two years after the disappearance, her friend Iolene and publicist Gil decide to look into it more, and there begins a downward spiral into the gritty underbelly of LA. Megan was hugely inspired by film noir and the Chandler, Hammett, Cain school of writing. But she also looked at Dorothy Hughes. Here's what she had to say about our other book selection this month - a landmark title by Hughes: "While not the first serial killer tale, Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place (1947) set up a template for hundreds to come, anticipating even Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (1952) by bringing the reader inside the killer’s fevered head... She has in mind something larger—about the nature of sex crimes, but also about the complicated, freighted environment of America just after World War II. In fact, if you wanted one book to tell you about the consuming gender trouble and sexual paranoia of that moment, you could do no better than Hughes’s too long neglected masterpiece."
Official Selection:
This month's theme is NOIR - specifically noir by women authors. Megan Abbott's doctorate was based on literary noir of the 40's and 50's, and no other contemporary writer has managed to capture that style so accurately in their own work. The Song is You, Megan's second book, is based on the true story of Jean Spangler, a Hollywood starlet who disappeared in the 1940's. Two years after the disappearance, her friend Iolene and publicist Gil decide to look into it more, and there begins a downward spiral into the gritty underbelly of LA. Megan was hugely inspired by film noir and the Chandler, Hammett, Cain school of writing. But she also looked at Dorothy Hughes. Here's what she had to say about our other book selection this month - a landmark title by Hughes: "While not the first serial killer tale, Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place (1947) set up a template for hundreds to come, anticipating even Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (1952) by bringing the reader inside the killer’s fevered head... She has in mind something larger—about the nature of sex crimes, but also about the complicated, freighted environment of America just after World War II. In fact, if you wanted one book to tell you about the consuming gender trouble and sexual paranoia of that moment, you could do no better than Hughes’s too long neglected masterpiece."
Bonus Selection:
The 1952 classic noir novel told from the killer's point of view
Bonus Selection:
Another landmark detective novel of the 40's (1943) written by a woman, and the basis for the classic movie starring Gene Tierney