Série noire is a French
publishing
Publishing is the activities of making information, literature, music, software, and other content, physical or digital, available to the public for sale or free of charge. Traditionally, the term publishing refers to the creation and distribu ...
imprint, founded in 1945 by
Marcel Duhamel. It has released a
collection of
crime fiction
Crime fiction, detective story, murder mystery, crime novel, mystery novel, and police novel are terms used to describe narratives or fiction that centre on criminal acts and especially on the investigation, either by an amateur or a professiona ...
of the
hardboiled detective thrillers variety published by
Gallimard.
Anglo-American literature forms the bulk of their collection: it features especially
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive durin ...
,
Dashiell Hammett,
Horace McCoy,
William R. Burnett,
Ed McBain,
Chester Himes,
Lou Cameron,
Jim Thompson,
Rene Brabazon Raymond (under his pseudonym James Hadley Chase) and
Peter Cheyney. Books from the series were adapted into episodes on the 1984 television series
of the same name.
This name became a generic term for works of detective, and is considered to have inspired the French critic
Nino Frank to create in 1946 the phrase
Film noir
Film noir (; ) is a style of Cinema of the United States, Hollywood Crime film, crime dramas that emphasizes cynicism (contemporary), cynical attitudes and motivations. The 1940s and 1950s are generally regarded as the "classic period" of Ameri ...
, which describes
Hollywood crime dramas.
In common parlance, today, the term also means a series of dramatic events with similarities, or affecting the same victims.
References
External links
Collection
Gallimard
Editorial collections
Éditions Gallimard books
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