Book publishers were not going to miss out on this growing interest and crime content in movie tie-ins accounted for a hefty percentage of total film books in the 1940s and early 1950s, the heyday of film noir.  The era of “tough guys and hard dames” was here.  This narrative will focus to a greater degree on books with tough male characters, as the ladies have a subject of their own in femme fatale.  Hollywood was able to typecast a few individuals in crime films and when we hear their names it simply resonates with this theme.

A 1940 film City for Conquest is an early entry in this field.  The novel by Abel Kandel depicted a love triangle punctuated by the corruption in the boxing world and the seduction of Broadway.  The lead role played by the well-known on-screen gangster James Cagney set the model for many films to come.  The photoplay edition by Duell, Sloan and Pearce was a third printing, with Cagney and Ann Sheridan on the jacket front panel with interior stills.  In this instance, the second printing of the novel gave credit to Warner Bros. forthcoming film on the jacket flap.  This title is not easy to acquire and some copies have ‘spent time’ in public libraries.

Double Indemnity was written by James M. Cain and brought to the movie screen via the screenplay of Billy Wilder (director) and Raymond Chandler.  This title appears in most top ten lists related to film noir.  Fred MacMurray, Edward G. Robinson (another tough guy), and Barbara Stanwyck round out the casting in this classic film.  Sadly, only a couple of movie tie-in paperbacks exist.  Robinson can also be ‘seen’ in The Woman in the Window (1944) and Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948).

The World Publishing Company headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio captured the ‘crime scene’ in their line of Tower Mysteries in the mid-1940s.  The equivalent ‘over the pond’ publisher is World Film Publications in their series of “Book of the Film” novelizations. 

Who can forget Humphrey Bogart's inimitable portrayals of these hard=boiled types ... whether it be Sam Spade in the 1941 Warner Bros. classic The Maltese Falcon or Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep.  Nobody did it quite like Bogie.  Some could argue that these two roles, along with Casablanca, contributed significantly to Bogart being named as the greatest male star of classic American cinema by the American Film Institute in 1999.  Bogart would figure prominently at the center of many noir films ... a few of these with movie tie-ins.  Humphrey Bogart (tough guy supreme) can be seen in classic poses within Conflict (1945) The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Dead Reckoning (1947). 

Robert Mitchum, perhaps the badest boy from Hollywood gave us a portrayal in Out of the Past that is classic film noir.  The novel Build My Gallows High by Geoffrey Holmes (Daniel Mainwaring) was first published in 1946 (the same year as film) with a jacket back panel blurb stating RKO had bought the film rights.  The Jonathan Press digest paperback in 1947 allowed only a written credit to this film as well.

Other more photographic film noir examples to watch for include The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett, This Gun for Hire by Graham Greene, The Brasher Doubloon and Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler, Deadline at Dawn by William Irish (Cornell Woolrich), and The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler.