Richard Ferrone

The pioneering, incisive, lavishly illustrated survey of noir on television-the first of its kind. Noir-as a style, movement, or sensibility-has its roots in hardboiled detective fiction by writers like Chandler and Hammett, and films adapted from their novels were among the first called "film noir" by French cinéastes. But film isn't the only medium with a taste for a dark story. Hundreds of noir dramas have been produced for television, featuring...

From back cover: Part-time carpenter, full-time drinker and co-conspirator with a mutt named Eddie Van Halen, Sam tries to live simply -- but as alwys, fate intervens. Robbie Milhouser, a local builder and blundering bully, shares at least one thing with Sam : an attraction to ghe beautiful Amanda Anselma. When Milhouser winds up dead after he and Sam have a public run-in, Sam is the prime suspect.

When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty-even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain.

To National Book Award–winning author Barry Lopez, the desert and the river are landscapes alive with poetry, mystery, seduction, and enchantment. In these two works of fiction, the narrator responds viscerally and emotionally to their moods and changes, their secrets and silences, and their unique power. Desert Notes portrays the mystical power of an American desert, and the reflections it sparks in the characters who travel there. River Notes,...

The public knows him as the character Tony Darvo in the movie Midnight Run, but Richie Salerno was born into the world of the Brooklyn Mafia during the heyday of the New York mob, and for a time it looked like he would get caught up in a life of crime. After all, some of the most notorious figures in the gangster world he knew as uncles, aunts, cousins, and family friends. During a stint in prison for theft, Richie turned his life around using the...

Does racing around a track at speeds up to 230 miles per hour sound interesting to you? How about doing it in front of 350,000 screaming fans? If you think that would be a good way to pass the time, then Indy racing is for you. Indy cars are some of the sleekest, fastest, most advanced racing machines in the world. But it hasn't always been that way. When Ray Harroun won the first Indianapolis 500 in 1911, his average speed was 74.6 miles per hour....

The former president of St. Johns College reveals why 2,500 years of learning in the West is of inestimable value to all of us, and why its trashing is a crime of monumental proportions. The liberal arts are dying. They are dying because most Americans don't see the point of them. Americans don't understand why anyone would study literature or history or the classics, or, more contemporarily, feminist criticism, whiteness studies, or the literature...

It might be said that both Jim Currys were the victims of fate. Jim Curry the elder had an unsavory reputation, but he only got into bad trouble when, demonstrating a slick piece of gun play to Dad Jackson, he accidentally killed him. Wanting to do the right thing, Jim Curry the elder rode into town to explain what happened to Sheriff Mason, and though the sheriff accepted his explanation, he insisted Jim be locked up to await trial. Then the real...

Cybils Award-winning author Laura Amy Schlitz crafts a masterful interpretation of one of the Grimm Brothers' most engrossing fairy tales. A cold and hungry soldier is returning from war. He has no money, so he makes a pact with the devil. If he can wear a bearskin for seven years, he will always have plenty of gold. But if he tells anyone of the pact, he will lose his soul.

Did a spoiled rich girl die in a plane crash or is she hiding with her homicidal lover in the Florida Keys? Whose body is that in the wreckage? Who put it there?