text: James M. Cain is regarded as an American pioneer of the hardboiled and noir genres.  Other important early American writers in the noir genre include Cornell Woolrich, Jim Thompson, Horace McCoy, and David Goodis.  In the 1950s, Fawcett Books' Gold Medal imprint was instrumental in releasing noir and crime novels from such writers as Elliott Chaze, Charles Williams, Gil Brewer, Harry Whittington, Peter Rabe, and Lionel White, as well as Goodis and Thompson.  In the 1980s, American publisher Black Lizard would re-release many of these works.  Today, publisher Akashic Books features an elaborate line of noir short-story anthologies.
  Prominent European authors of the genre include Jean-Claude Izzo and Massimo Carlotto.  According to Italian publisher Sandro Ferri, "Mediterranean noir" is remarkable for its attention to the duality of Mediterranean life:The prevailing vision in the novels belonging to the genre known as Mediterranean noir is a pessimistic one.  Authors and their literary inventions look upon the cities of the Mediterranean and see places that have been broken, battered, and distorted by crime.  There is always a kind of dualism that pervades these works.  On one hand, there is the Mediterranean lifestyle—fine wine and fine food, friendship, conviviality, solidarity, blue skies and limpid seas—an art of living brought almost to perfection.  On the other hand, violence, corruption, greed, and abuses of power.Of latter-day novelists who write in both the hardboiled and noir modes, the most prominent is James Ellroy.  Calling noir "the most scrutinized offshoot of the hard-boiled school of fiction", he wrote:The thrill of noir is the rush of moral forfeit and the abandonment to titillation.  The social importance of noir is its grounding in the big themes of race, class, gender, and systemic corruption.  The overarching and lasting appeal of noir is that it makes doom fun.