Fresh noir

It's been a recurring motif of my thinking about crime fiction: the occasional work that finds some new theme, setting or technique to bring back the kick that noir and the hardest of hard-boiled used to have.

Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera's Scalped did this for me most recently. Novels by Megan Abbott and Declan Burke had done so earlier. The three works accomplished this in different ways, primarily (though not exclusively) through setting and artwork in the first case, character in the second and action in the third.

What about you? What relatively recent crime writing has found new ways to deliver that nasty kick of a Hammett, a Chandler, a (Paul) Cain, a Jonathan Latimer, a Goodis or a Jim Thompson? How did it do so?

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P.S. I was remiss yesterday in not thanking Brian Lindenmuth for bringing Scalped to my attention and letting me read his bound collection of the first five issues.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008