Actually, I was a big horror fan for five or ten years, and
my love of hard-boiled kind of grew out of this love like a
parasitic Siamese twin...
It's interesting to think which horror writers have
noirish/hard-boiled elements. Ramsy Campbell comes to mind,
especially his short stories. The protagonists are usually
very alienated. His setting is invariably Liverpool, which he
depicts as a nightmarish slum. His characters develop
paranoid obsessions and start having hallucinations which
come true. DARK COMPANIONS and WAKING NIGHTMARES are two good
collections. Robert Aikman's the same, only more so. I have
PAINTED DEVILS and COLD HAND IN MINE, both recommended. His
stories are often period pieces, though.
There are authors who went back and forth between the H-B
pulps and the weird menaces, like Robert Bloch and Fritz
Leiber... Stephen King is very pulpy and often H-B...
Movie-wise, you don't get any more noirish than Jaques
Tournier(sp?) in terms of atmosphere. In general, the
psychopath is a stock character in both worlds, and there's a
huge gray area between them that authors will often
explore...
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