Historical Noir by Barry Forshaw
Barry Forshaw, one of the UK’s leading experts on crime fiction, has written a lively, wide-ranging and immensely informed history of the genre as part of his award-winning ‘Noir’ series (that includes Brit Noir and Nordic Noir), which might be said to have begun in earnest with Ellis Peters’ crime-solving monk Brother Cadfael in the 1970s and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose in 1980 (with another monkish detective), but which has now taken readers to virtually every era and locale in the past.
Historical Noir: The Pocket Essential Guide to Fiction, Film and TV deals with the phenomenon right from its inception with such writers as Josephine Tey, examining the work of such multi-prize-winning authors as C.J. Sansom (with his Tudor-set mysteries) to Robert Harris (whose books span the centuries), Philip Kerr (wartime Berlin), plus Lindsey Davis, Boris Akunin, Antonia Hodgson, Rory Clements, Martin Cruz Smith and Andrew Taylor (who has tackled everything from Edgar Allan Poe’s 19th-century America to the Great Fire of London), along with virtually every other important writer in the still-burgeoning genre.
Barry is on the shortlist for this year’s prestigious HRF Keating Award with American Noir and is a renowned critic and commentator on crime fiction – film, TV, and novels above all.
