The literary tradition of the hard-boiled brand of thriller goes back at least a decade earlier, to when Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain published stories in 1930s magazines. Then came the classic novels, followed by black-and-white film adaptations that filtered the books’ existential themes through plays of light and shadow, while doubling down on their sex, tawdriness, and cruelty. After World War II, French film critics saw them in a flash and called them noir. Named in France, the form is a cultural ouroboros orbiting Los Angeles.
~ Carolyn Kellogg via The Atlantic

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