The Maltese Falcon
by Dashiell Hammett
One of the first detective films to use the expressionistic lighting characteristic of noir style, Huston's adaptation was also the first to capture Hammett's taut dialogue and lean storytelling style. Bogart, meanwhile, became the definitive Sam Spade, bringing the tough-talking, hard-drinking sleuth to life.

The Big Sleep
by Raymond Chandler
A master craftsman of the hardboiled detective genre, Raymond Chandler defined a paradigm and inspired a host of imitators in fiction, film, and television. Devastating femme fatales, wry and incorruptible detectives, gritty urban landscapes—his work established the basic vocabulary of the genre.

Double Indemnity
by James M. Cain
Directed by Billy Wilder and co-scripted by hardboiled master Raymond Chandler. This film takes Cain's riveting and complex plot and pulls out all the stops—from dramatic lighting borrowed from the German Expressionist silent films Wilder had worked on earlier in his career, to a tightly wound plot and a classic femme fatale. The results are staggering.

Phantom Lady
by Cornell Woolrich
Penned under a pseudonym, William Irish, Cornell Woolrich's Phantom Lady pioneered the now-common "innocent-man-condemned" plot. In the often-overlooked noir drama adapted from the Woolrich novel, director Robert Siodmak successfully employs many of the genre's technical devices to create a dark urban atmosphere.

Dark Passage
by David Goodis
Initially published serially in the Saturday Evening Post, Dark Passage established Goodis as a leading author of crime fiction. The film adaptation, an underappreciated gem of the noir genre, was filmed at Warner Bros in 1947 by Delmer Daves; the success of the film landed Goodis on the studio's payroll as a screenwriter.

Nightmare Alley
by William Lindsay Gresham
This portrait of the seedy lives of carnies takes one of noir's favorite milieus and yields a harrowing portrait of one man's descent into degradation. The storyline details a carnival mentalist's rapid rise to, and inevitable fall from, the big time. The fallen carny suffers the ultimate degradation: he finds himself playing the geek in a sideshow.

The Asphalt Jungle
by W. R. Burnett
Burnett set the pace for the noir movie genre in Hollywood, with works such as Little Caesar, High Sierra, and The Asphalt Jungle. He wrote 36 books, 60 screenplays and dozens of short stories. His early fiction fits into the genre of pre-war gangster fiction, a genre that exerted a potent influence on the the writing that would come to be known as hardboiled.

Kiss Tomorrow Good-bye
by Horace McCoy
An often-overlooked author of the hardboiled genre, McCoy was first published in the late 1920s in such magazines as Detective-Dragnet, Detective Action Stories, and Black Mask. Although McCoy worked in Hollywood for a number of years after 1931, his scripts were mostly westerns and crime melodramas.

Kiss Me, Deadly
by Mickey Spillane
Spillane's Mike Hammer is known for his terse, sardonic language, righteously vengeful moral stance, and aggressive, take-no-prisoners attitude. As Hammer says in Kiss Me, Deadly, "There's no such thing as innocence—innocence touched with guilt is as good a deal as you can get."