WALL STREET JOURNAL AND THE NOIR BY TOM NOLAN

The Holidays Are Part of the Puzzle

Mystery writers like to feature Christmas themes—

and their work inspires mysteriously interesting 

gift books, too

Dominic Bugatto

Christmas, with its implicit promise of God and
sinners reconciled and the world put to rights, 
would seem a perfect setting for detective fiction, 
with its crime-propelled storylines and righteous 
truth-seekers. The season has indeed held special 
appeal for mystery-writers ever since Arthur Conan 
Doyle's Sherlock Holmes (in "The Adventure of the 
Blue Carbuncle") stuck his hand in a Christmas 
goose and plucked out a gem of great price and 
mysterious origin.

As Venice is to Commissario Brunetti, 
San Francisco is to Dashiell Hammett's iconic 
detectives, including Sam Spade. In "The Dashiell 
Hammett Tour" (Vince Emery Productions, 214 pages, 
$19.95), Don Herron (who has conducted actual 
Hammett-themed tours for years) guides readers 
along the Northern California routes of Hammett's 
characters and stories, with anecdotes, anecdotes, 
insights, maps and memories. The book is a 
wonderfully illustrated Baedeker to the 
real-life scenes of a marvelous fictional world, 
and it includes a preface by Hammett's 
daughter, Jo.

Catherine Corman's "Daylight Noir: Raymond 
Chandler's Imagined City" (Charta, 126 pages, 
$39.95)takes a more minimalist approach to 
Chandler's Los Angeles: just Ms. Corman's 
full-page black-and-white photographs, 
a scattering of lines from Chandler 
himself and a brief preface by the 
novelist Jonathan Lethem.

But the book is magical. The spare images 
come at you from oblique angles: a section 
of tile-roofed bungalow glimpsed between 
branches, the Art Deco façade of an old 
hotel seen against a sun-white sky, a 
flight of wooden steps ascending toward 
palm trees, the thatched roof of a cottage 
like a witch's nest. With no people in 
sight, these buildings are haunting, 
and haunted. Ms. Corman captures the 
essence of Chandler that still hovers 
throughout L.A.

—Mr. Nolan is the editor of Ross 
Macdonald's "The Archer Files: 
The Complete Short Stories of 
Lew Archer, Private Investigator."