Victoria dougherty's Blog (1)

Recently, I started a discussion on Crimespace (a crime/thriller uber-fan sight I highly recommend for those obsessed with city lights, cigarettes, bad women and rye whiskey). I posed this question: Is there a place for humor in a hard-boiled thriller/noir? The answers I got were mixed, but there was a hesitancy that trended towards “No.” One Crimespacer quoted Otto Penzler – “Noir requires a sense of bleakness and despair, and characters so flawed, their failure is in their…