Overview

Film noir is one of the most exciting and most debated products of studio-era Hollywood, but did you know that American radio broadcast many programs in the noir vein through the 1940s and 1950s? These included adaptations of such well-known films as The Maltese Falcon, Murder, My Sweet, and Double Indemnity, detective series devoted to the adventures of private eyes Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, and the spine-tingling anthology programs Lights Out and Suspense. Thrillers, Chillers, and Killers is the first book to explore in detail noir storytelling on the two media, arguing that radio’s noir dramas played an important role as a counterpart to, influence on, or a spin-off from the noir films. Besides shedding new light on long-neglected radio dramas, and a medium that was cinema’s major rival, this scrupulously researched yet accessible study also uses these programs to challenge conventional understandings of the much-debated topic of noir.

Full Product Details

9781978836389

Table of Contents

Reviews

""A fascinating and thoroughly engaging book that successfully explores the neglected field of radio drama and its close relationship with cinema. Krutnik's excellent scholarship widens our knowledge of a thrilling era of popular culture, finding a dynamic correlation between the screen and the airwaves."" -- Richard Hand * author of Terror on the Air!: Horror Radio in America, 1931–1952 *

Author Information

FRANK KRUTNIK is an emeritus reader in film studies at the University of Sussex in Brighton. His publications include Popular Film and Television Comedy; In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity; and Inventing Jerry Lewis; and he is coeditor of Un-American Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (Rutgers University Press).

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