Crossgenre noir: 50 favourites

My friend Neddal Ayad is fascinated with the idea of weird noir -- the confluence of noir and weird horror. The list below was partly inspired by an email exchange with him that, at the outset, was concerned with weird noir and then grew to include traditional noir.

There's a lot of talk about crossgenre works in SF and fantasy; so, I thought, why not apply that to noir also?

The list below, then, is my personal "top 50" noir books -- including collections and novels -- regardless of primary genre affiliation: horror, crime, SF, "mainstream", etc.

I had a few self-imposed parameters to help me keep the list down to an even 50:
-books had to have been published between 1950 and 1999;
-no more than 3 titles per author -- except for noir god Jim Thompson (he gets 7).

Bear in mind that the titles listed are not necessarily my favourites by these authors, but those that best fit a loosely defined noir template of a deeply alienated protagonist struggling hopelessly against forces from both within and without -- or some variation thereof.

There are horrible gaps in my reading, as some readers will no doubt immediately realize. Nevertheless, here are, in chronological order, my 50 favourite crossgenre noirs: 1950-1999.

1. Fredric Brown: His Name Was Death (1951)
2. Fredric Brown: The Far Cry (1951)
3. Jim Thompson: The Killer Inside Me (1952)
4. Jim Thompson: Savage Night (1953)
5. Jim Thompson: A Swell-Looking Babe (1954)
6. Jim Thompson: After Dark, My Sweet (1955)
7. Fredric Brown: The Lenient Beast (1956)
8. Jim Thompson: The Kill-Off (1957)
9. Jim Thompson: Wild Town (1957)
10. J.G. Ballard: The Drowned World (1962)
11. Jim Thompson: The Grifters (1963)
12. Sébastien Japrisot: La Dame dans l'auto avec des lunettes et un fusil (1966)
13. Robert Silverberg: Dying Inside (1972)
14. Robert Silverberg: The Book of Skulls (1972)
15. J.G. Ballard: Crash (1973)
16. Sébastien Japrisot: L'Été meurtrier (1977)
17. Arthur Byron Cover: An East Wind Coming (1979)
18. Jacques Sternberg: Agathe et Béatrice, Claire et Dorothée (1979)
19. Philippe Djian: Bleu comme l'enfer (1982)
20. Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984)
21. Philippe Djian: Zone érogène (1984)
22. William Gibson: Burning Chrome (1986)
23. George Alec Effinger: When Gravity Fails (1986)
24. Lucius Shepard: The Jaguar Hunter (1987)
25. George Alec Effinger: A Fire in the Sun (1988)
26. Paul Auster: The New York Trilogy (1990)
27. Kim Newman: The Night Mayor (1990)
28. George Alec Effinger: The Exile Kiss (1991)
29. Theodore Roszak: Flicker (1991)
30. Lucius Shepard: The Ends of the Earth (1991)
31. Philip Kerr: A Philosophical Investigation (1992)
32. Will Self: Cock & Bull (1992)
33. Donna Tart: The Secret History (1992)
34. Iain Banks: Complicity (1993)
35. Michael Blumlein: X,Y (1993)
36. Jonathan Carroll: After Silence (1993)
37. Bradley Denton: Blackburn (1993)
38. Philip Kerr: Berlin Noir (1993)
39. William Browning Spencer: The Return of Count Electric (1993)
40. Caleb Carr: The Alienist (1994)
41. Jonathan Carroll: From the Teeth of Angels (1994)
42. Kim Newman: The Original Dr. Shade and Other Stories (1994)
43. Laren Stover: Pluto, Animal Lover (1994)
44. Kim Newman: Famous Monsters (1995)
45. William Browning Spencer: Résumé with Monsters (1995)
46. William Browning Spencer: Zod Wallop (1995)
47. Paul Di Filippo: Ribofunk (1996)
48. Todd Grimson: Stainless (1996)
49. Paul Di Filippo: Ciphers: A Post-Shannon Rock-n-Roll Mystery (1997)
50. Chuck Palahniuk: Invisible Monsters (1999)