Thrillers, Chillers, and Killers

Radio and Film Noir

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by Frank Krutnik

Type

Studies

Subject

Genre > Film Noir

Keywords

film noir, broadcast

Publishing date

2025 (May 13, 2025)

Publisher

Rutgers University Press

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 252 pages
6 x 9 inches (15.5 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-1-9788363-8-9

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Book Presentation:
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.

About the Author:
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; Inventing Jerry Lewis; and he is coeditor of Un-American Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (Rutgers University Press).

See the publisher website: Rutgers University Press