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I have a confession to make. With the exception of the "Killer Inside Me" and "Thieves Like Us," I come to the 11 novels in this excellent twovolume compendium through the movies: I saw the film adaptations before I read the books, and because the lens through which I came to know noir was filmic before it was literary woolrich coat Black Friday, I often hesitated to pick up the book. I wasn't sure I wanted to interfere with the images I had formed in my head of Ray Milland as George Stroud and Charles Laughton as Earl Janoth in "The Big Clock" or Tyrone Power as Stan Carlisle in "Nightmare Alley."

Once I read these crime novels, I was happy to find that they deepened my appreciation for the films and then took off on their own, filling in the vast gulfs in characterization, lyrical description, complex interior monologue (far beyond the capabilities of conventional voiceover) and provided a deeper layering of secondary characters that limits any film adaptation of a novel.

With this twovolume set, Library of America continues to expand its pantheon, which began with definitive collections of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Henry James and now includes works by Raymond Chandler and Nathanael West. (One hopes for a similar compendium of science fiction writing with, for starters, Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick.)

In addition to "The Big Clock" and "Nightmare Alley," Volume 1 features James M. Cain's "The Postman Always Rings Twice;" Edward Anderson's "Thieves Like Us;" Cornell Woolrich's "I Married a Dead Man" and Horace McCoy's "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"

All of these novels were adapted to film, some more than once, none following any predictable production pattern. The McCoy novel, for example, waited 34 years for its film adaptation, and Woolrich's appeared within just two years of publication as the film "No Man of Her Own." (Reflecting the symbiotic relationship between the United States and France with regard to both film noir and pulp crime fiction, "No Man of Her Own" was remade in France in 1982 under the title "I Married a Shadow.")

In fact, film noir aficionados who may not be aware of Woolrich's enormous contribution to the genre ought to discover an appreciation for him in the written word woolrich coat Black Friday. He is undoubtedly the most adapted noir novelist of all time; from his fiction sprang classic films noir such as "Phantom Lady," "Deadline at Dawn," "Black Angel," "The Window," "The Leopard Man," "Fear in the Night" and "Night Has a Thousand Eyes." And this is only a partial listing.

"American Noir of the 1950s" begins with Jim Thompson's "The Killer Inside Me," surely, from the perspective of a psychopathic killer, one of the most chilling firstperson narratives in American fiction. It concludes with Chester Himes' "The Real Cool Killers," the first of his seven police thrillers set in Harlem featuring the detectives Grave Digger Joes and Coffin Ed Johnson. Most of these stories were written in Europe and published first in France as part of the Serie Noire, a series of crime novels edited by the poet Marcel Duhamel under the prestigious umbrella of the Editions Gallimard publishing house.

The other stories in this volume are Charles Willeford's utterly nihilistic "Pickup"; the brilliantly sinister and urbane "The Talented Mr. Ripley," by Patricia Highsmith; and David Goodis' "Down There," which was adapted by Francois Truffaut into one of the French New Wave's iconic films, "Shoot the Piano Player."

Considering the volumes' subtitles, it is worth noting that, with the exception of "The Real Cool Killers," all the novels in these volumes were written before the term "noir" was applied to film or fiction in this country woolrich coat Black Friday at lowest price. French critic Nino Frank coined the term "film noir" in early 1946 while writing about the dark American wartime and postwar thrillers that were then the rage in Parisian cinemas. According to Webster's, "film noir" did not enter the English language until 1958.