100 books like Dark City

Film critic Molly Haskell provides an excellent narrative overview of the major eras, themes, and issues related to women in film, with particular emphasis on Hollywood’s best, worst, and most complex images and genres.

I especially like the section on “The Women’s Film” as it explains the form and function of melodramas, a.k.a. “the weepies,” which later became “the chick flick.” These films that focus on women’s lives and emotions both limit the way women were (and sometimes still are) portrayed on the big screen while simultaneously centering women’s lives in ways too few films have.

Join Haskell on a trip from the 1920s-1980s, full of strong, honest opinions on the images of women that mainstream Hollywood has offered.

Gabler offers a detailed and persuasive history of Hollywood’s first producers, all immigrant Jewish Americans seeking to achieve the American dream.

This handful of men started in New York as peddlers or small business owners and then moved west to build their own film empires. No one saw motion pictures as more than a superficial pastime, but it seemed a good business opportunity. Unfortunately, Thomas Edison owned the rights and patents that kept Jewish entrepreneurs from accessing New York, so the immigrants went west.

MGM, Warner Brothers, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, and Universal: these were their kingdoms and are still the names we know today as the major Hollywood studios. Meet the remarkable (and sometimes horrible) men who built this world and learn about their lives and ambitions in Gabler’s engaging book.

Katharine Hepburn, who worked with George Cukor in a whopping ten films, was known for her strength. She was a strong actor with strong opinions and a strong presence. She went through phases from atypical ingénue to box office poison to megastar.

Learning about her life through Hepburn’s own perspectives in her own words is riveting. She is prickly and poignant, biting and benevolent.

I once played Henry Higgins' mother in a local theatrical production of My Fair Lady. I delighted in the music and in portraying (in a white wig and wrinkled make-up) the stern, wise Mrs. Higgins, even as I also wondered whether Higgins and Pickering were perhaps secretly a couple and if Eliza was asexual.

This made me want to read the play on which My Fair Lady is based, George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. I did not get answers to my somewhat whimsical questions about sexuality, but I did see in even greater relief the turning of women into objects that ambitious, selfish men may do.

Another Jim Thompson classic, The Grifters is about a trio of con artists trying to move up from being small-time crooks. They add love and a mother/son relationship into the mix which only makes things worse. The film directed by Stephen Frears is a master-class in acting from Anjelica Huston, Annette Bening, and John Cusak. The scene at the end couldn’t be more shocking as a way to wrap up a noir film. Money is paramount in the world of the grifters, everything else secondary. What could be more noir than that?

I love books that mash up genres and Dan Will has done just that with this first offering in his Arcane Casebook series. His hero, Alexander Lockerby, is a man after my own heart—a noir detective through and through. Only this fedora-wearing gumshoe has a little extra zing up his sleeve—magic. He’s a runewright, and while I have to admit I didn’t know what that was when I began the book, it became perfectly clear by the end. I won’t ruin it for you, but suffice it to say, it’s aces with the noir genre—a man gifted with certain talents, but not ones enough to gain him the easy life. This story starts out simple, but takes little time to grab you by the collar and slap you across the kisser. And the good news? There are eight more to keep it company. 

I have loved this novel since first reading it in college—probably when I should have been studying for exams! 

Double Indemnity is one of the first and best American noir novels and served as the basis for the 1944 film by the same name. The novel taught me about the classic noir trap: a basically good but flawed man helps a basically bad but attractive woman in an effort to murder her husband, the good/flawed man hoping to end up with both the woman and the money.

But things seem fated to go wrong, and what starts out as a bleak tale ends up even bleaker—at the dark end of a one-way street. Since reading this powerful novel—and seeing the equally powerful film with its crackling dialogue by famed hardboiled crime writer Raymond Chandler—I have never looked at life quite the same way again.

Author Louise Doughty's books demonstrate that psychological suspense and crime novels can be literary fiction. Platform Seven is well-written but opens in a location that’s anything but inspiring – Peterborough railway station. What could possibly happen here? But we’re soon drawn into the isolation and menacing sense that it’s something very bad indeed. This novel could be called a ‘genre splice’ – part domestic noir and part ghost story. Doughty’s genius is laying the breadcrumb trail of clues to keep the reader turning the pages and staying ahead of Lisa, the main character. She seems to be unaware of what’s really going on, or perhaps chooses to ignore the signs. An emotional story with a theme of coercive behaviour for book clubs to discuss. 

A treasure trove of noir short fiction, an impressive anthology of  American greed, crime, and comeuppance by some of the genre’s greatest authors including Mickey Spillane, Evan Hunter, Elmore Leonard, Patricia Highsmith, Joyce Carol Oates, Dennis Lehane, Cornell Woolrich, and editor Ellroy. The 39 selected stories are a feast of excellence, a wide-ranging buffet of tasty tales from 1923 to 2007—makes me drool just thinking about a re-read.

Set in the seventies, a sexy female celebrity journalist sets out to find the reason for the break-up of a singing/comedy duo alá Lewis and Martin and uncovers a gruesome murder. Full of sex, drugs, and behind-the-scenes entertainment business debauchery, this story is told in a masterful way that is funny, frightful, suspenseful, and disturbing. A truly unique noir tale where no one comes away clean. Just how I like it. And written by my good friend and former employer, Rupert Holmes. The same guy that gave us “Escape, The Pina Colada Song” and the Broadway hit The Mystery of Edwin Drood.