CRIME NOVELS: American Noir of the 1950s.<i> Edited by Robert Polito</i> .<i> The Library of America: 892 pp., $35</i>

I have a confession to make. With the exception of the “Killer Inside Me” and “Thieves Like Us,” I come to the 11 novels in this excellent two-volume compendium through the movies: I saw the film adaptations before I read the books, and because the lens through which I came to know noir was filmic before it was literary, I often hesitated to pick up the book. I wasn’t sure I wanted to interfere with the images I had formed in my head of Ray Milland as George Stroud and Charles Laughton as Earl Janoth in “The Big Clock” or Tyrone Power as Stan Carlisle in “Nightmare Alley.”

Once I read these crime novels, I was happy to find that they deepened my appreciation for the films and then took off on their own, filling in the vast gulfs in characterization, lyrical description, complex interior monologue (far beyond the capabilities of conventional voice-over) and provided a deeper layering of secondary characters that limits any film adaptation of a novel.

In short, if you liked the movie, you’ll love the book.

With this two-volume set, Library of America continues to expand its pantheon, which began with definitive collections of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Henry James and now includes works by Raymond Chandler and Nathanael West. (One hopes for a similar compendium of science fiction writing with, for starters, Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick.)

In addition to “The Big Clock” and “Nightmare Alley,” Volume 1 features James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice;” Edward Anderson’s “Thieves Like Us;” Cornell Woolrich’s “I Married a Dead Man” and Horace McCoy’s “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”

All of these novels were adapted to film, some more than once, none following any predictable production pattern. The McCoy novel, for example, waited 34 years for its film adaptation, and Woolrich’s appeared within just two years of publication as the film “No Man of Her Own.” (Reflecting the symbiotic relationship between the United States and France with regard to both film noir and pulp crime fiction, “No Man of Her Own” was remade in France in 1982 under the title “I Married a Shadow.”)

In fact, film noir aficionados who may not be aware of Woolrich’s enormous contribution to the genre ought to discover an appreciation for him in the written word. He is undoubtedly the most adapted noir novelist of all time; from his fiction sprang classic films noir such as “Phantom Lady,” “Deadline at Dawn,” “Black Angel,” “The Window,” “The Leopard Man,” “Fear in the Night” and “Night Has a Thousand Eyes.” And this is only a partial listing.

“American Noir of the 1950s” begins with Jim Thompson’s “The Killer Inside Me,” surely, from the perspective of a psychopathic killer, one of the most chilling first-person narratives in American fiction. It concludes with Chester Himes’ “The Real Cool Killers,” the first of his seven police thrillers set in Harlem featuring the detectives Grave Digger Joes and Coffin Ed Johnson. Most of these stories were written in Europe and published first in France as part of the Serie Noire, a series of crime novels edited by the poet Marcel Duhamel under the prestigious umbrella of the Editions Gallimard publishing house.

The other stories in this volume are Charles Willeford’s utterly nihilistic “Pick-up”; the brilliantly sinister and urbane “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” by Patricia Highsmith; and David Goodis’ “Down There,” which was adapted by Francois Truffaut into one of the French New Wave’s iconic films, “Shoot the Piano Player.”

Considering the volumes’ subtitles, it is worth noting that, with the exception of “The Real Cool Killers,” all the novels in these volumes were written before the term “noir” was applied to film or fiction in this country. French critic Nino Frank coined the term “film noir” in early 1946 while writing about the dark American wartime and postwar thrillers that were then the rage in Parisian cinemas. According to Webster’s, “film noir” did not enter the English language until 1958.

And though applying “noir” to fiction penned before 1946 might disturb those purists who erroneously claim that no true films noir were made after 1955, there is no question that writers of American crime fiction like Himes, commissioned by a French publisher, or Highsmith, who lived and worked in France, would be considered “noir.” They are after all part of a strong, dark current in American fiction that leads straight back to Edgar Allan Poe (lionized by Charles Baudelaire and other French Symbolists) and later influenced writers as diverse as William Burroughs, Henry Miller and Saul Bellow.

As for sociological catalysts, film noir was not just a reaction to World War II but a delayed reaction to the Great Depression; with noir fiction, the product--not of a massive, expensive collaboration but of a single author at a typewriter--the delay was much shorter.

Robert Polito, author of the award-winning 1995 biography of Jim Thompson, “Savage Art,” has done a terrific job selecting these novels, annotating them with general and specific comments and providing thumbnail biographies of the novelists so engaging that I only wished they could have been longer. For instance, I learned that Himes in 1948 served a residence at Yaddo, the writer’s colony in Saratoga, N.Y., with Highsmith, Truman Capote and Katherine Anne Porter and that 20 years earlier, he had been arrested twice in the same year for armed robbery and sentenced to 20 to 25 years hard labor in the Ohio State Penitentiary, where he survived a fire that killed 300 other inmates before being paroled. And that after leaving the military at 37 as a highly decorated master sergeant, Willeford entered college, received a string of degrees and ended up chairman of the English and philosophy departments at a junior college in Florida and that the year he became a full professor, he published two non-crime books, “Poontang and Other Poems” and “New Forms of Ugly: The Immobilized Man in Modern Literature.”

And that Kenneth Fearing, author of “The Big Clock,” was a Guggenheim fellow in poetry in 1937-’38. He, Anderson, Thompson, Woolrich and William Lindsay Gresham (author of “Nightmare Alley”), roughly half of the contributors here, were terminal alcoholics. And that Gresham and his wife, poet Joy Davidman, were deeply influenced by the writings of C.S. Lewis, converted to Protestantism and that, later, after Gresham, who soon gave up Christianity to dip into the occult and L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, divorced her, Davidman went to England and married Lewis. Finally, one would expect these 11 novelists to have urban backgrounds, but in fact only one, Woolrich, is from a major city.

For the most part, the prose in these books is extraordinarily lucent. But, like any other genre, the crime novel has its share of atrocious writing: Pulp at its worst can be wooden, overwrought, repetitive, purple or downright sloppy. At its best, the crime noir style is multifaceted and hard-boiled. From Fearing’s elegant poetry to Highsmith’s acid-limned wit to Himes’ visceral flights and Woolrich’s artful convolutions, the writers in these volumes, for all their shared themes, subjects and dark affinities, are as variegated a group as one could hope to find. Rightly famous for their sharp, dead-on dialogue and their ear for the streets, they employ a descriptive sureness and imagistic ingenuity no less arresting.

Here’s Willeford in “Pick-up”:

“It must have been around a quarter to eleven. A sailor came in and ordered a chile dog and coffee. I sliced a bun, jerked a frank out of the boiling water, nested it, poured a half-dipper of chile over the frank and sprinkled it liberally with chopped onions. I scribbled a check and put it by his plate.”

If “nested” is not the perfect verb to describe the placement of a frank into its bun, I don’t know what is.

Thompson begins “The Killer Inside Me” in a diner, the quintessential noir hangout on the low end of the social ladder (with the nightclub occupying the highest rung):

“I’d finished my pie and was having a second cup of coffee when I saw him. The midnight freight had come in a few minutes before; and he was peering in one end of the restaurant window, the end nearest the depot, shading his eyes with his hand and blinking against the light. He saw me watching him, and his face faded back into the shadows. But I knew he was still there. I knew he was waiting. The burns always size me up for an easy mark.”

And Himes opens the door onto his story “The Real Cool Killers” in a bar, the “Dew Drop Inn on 129th Street and Lenox Avenue,” in this electrifying sequence:

“Big Joe Turner was singing a rock-and-roll adaptation of Dink’s Blues.

“The loud licking rhythm blasted from the juke box with enough heat to melt bone.

“A woman leapt from her seat in a booth as though the music had stuck her full of tacks. She was a lean black woman clad in a pink cotton jersey dress and red silk stockings. She pulled up her skirt and began doing a shake dance as though trying to throw off the tacks one by one.

“Her mood was contagious. Other women jumped down from their high stools and shook themselves into the act. The customers laughed and shouted and began shaking too. The aisle between the bar and the booths became stormy with shaking bodies.”

These novels, nearly 2,000 pages in length, beautifully bound and arranged--often following rare first-edition design blueprints--contain some of the best crime writing of the genre’s golden decades. They should give much pleasure to lovers of film noir and readers addicted to original and eclectic writing. And for cineastes, “Pick-up” and “The Real Cool Killers,” alone among these novels, have yet to be made into films noir. So you’ll have to read the books first.