The Blonde on the Street Corner

In his introduction to the The Best American Noir of the Century, James Ellroy writes, 'noir is the most scrutinized offshoot of the hard-boiled school of fiction. It's the long drop off the short pier and the wrong man and the wrong woman in perfect misalliance. It's the nightmare of flawed souls with big dreams and the precise how and why of the all-time sure thing that goes bad.' Offering the best examples of literary sure things gone bad, this collection ensures that nowhere else can readers find a darker, more thorough distillation of American noir fiction.

James Ellroy and Otto Penzler, series editor of the annual The Best American Mystery Stories, mined one hundred years of writing - 1910-2010 - to find this treasure trove of thirty-nine stories. From noir's twenties-era infancy come gems like James M. Cain's 'Pastorale,' and its post-war heyday boasts giants like Mickey Spillane and Evan Hunter. Packing an undeniable punch, diverse contemporary incarnations include Elmore Leonard, Patricia Highsmith, Joyce Carol Oates, Dennis Lehane, and William Gay, with many page-turners appearing in the last decade.

Once in a while on Vernon Street, that blind alley of tired sin and lost hopes, someone reaches for the moon.

Like Kerrigan, the stevedore, the old-young man with the strength of three and the secret dreams of a life away from the hell of Vernon Street.

He met Loretta Channing, the slummer, the girl who drove an MG down Kerrigan's street. They fell in love and they would have been all right, except for Vernon Street.

It stood between them, this crooked length of scarred, cracked asphalt — an abyss that held them worlds apart.