While noir crime novels are a distinctly American art form, it’s one that’s practiced by writers all over the world. Sweden gave us Henning Mankell (Faceless Killers), Matz (The Killer Omnibus Volume 1) hails from France, while Japan’s Hideo Yokoyama recently made an impressive first impression with Six Four. But writer Michael Pronko is a little different. While the writer of The Last Train (paperback, digital) was born in Kansan City, he’s lived in Tokyo for the last twenty years, working as both a writer and a professor of American Literature at Meiji Gakuin University. All of which informed his own take on the noir crime novel.
Tag: noir crime novels
In his new crime novel The Third Squad (paperback, digital), writer V Sanjay Kumar introduces us to Karan, an autistic man who’s a member of an elite hit squad. But while this might make you think Kumar’s been reading a lot of comic books and James Bond novels lately, in talking to him about this novel, he reveals that this noir crime novel was actually inspired by real life events.
One of the common traits among noir crime novels is that they’re quick reads. You can usually tear through one in a weekend, especially if The Simpsons are a rerun. But in talking to writer Bradley Spinelli about his noir crime novel The Painted Gun (paperback, digital), it seems that it sometimes takes a lot longer than a Simpsons-free weekend to write one of these page-turners.