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Originally Posted by Slippery Jack  Saw Kiss Me Deadly earlier in the year - blew me away (like a nuclear blast  ...)!!! Grabbed the Criterion straight after the first viewing. I'm on the lookout now for noir as nutty as that  . . . |
I can't think of any film that is as barmy as "Kiss Me Deadly" but the last book in James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet, "White Jazz" has the relentlessness of KMD.
The four books in the series are:
The Black Dahlia
The Big Nowhere
L.A. Confidential
White Jazz
I can't praise these books enough, Ellroy was on fire when he wrote them.
I'd also recommend Ellroy's autobiographical work, "My Dark Places" which is a heady mix of Ellroy's memoirs and an investigation into his mother's murder. Ellroy comes across as a complete madman, openly confessing to breaking into women's homes to steal drugs and sniff panties in his youth, to ruthlessly exploiting his mother's murder to gain publicity as he started out as a writer.
@bdc, Future Noir sounds cool, you can see the visual influence of FN in a lot of films, though not so much the main themes.
@Demdike, the James Ellroy books mentioned above are a good place to start on modern hardboiled fiction but for older stuff I'd go for Charles Williams, "Dead Calm" is one of his, James .M McCain, "The Postman Always Rings Twice" is a great sparse read, and Jim Thompson.