Death on the Cheap: The Lost B Movies of Film Noir (2000) Arthur Lyons.

Arthur Lyons' book Death on the Cheap is a handy reference to the elusive noir genre.  Lyons recognizes the B roots of noir and rightly identifies the B-units of mainstream studios as the starting point for noir, but also dredges through Poverty Row output identifying significant contributions to the genre.   As Gerald Petievich points out in his introductory essay, "thankfully, the terms mise-en-scene, aesthetic reversals and rhetorical form do not appear in his text"; likely because Lyons is writing more of a straight history and not an aesthetic analysis.  Lyons situates these products within an economic context with roots in pulp novels and comics.  He defines a noir as a crime picture, where the characters live in an "unforgiving universe" and all players, even the good guys, are "uniformly corrupt."  The book, which is essentially a listing of key films that came to be associated with the genre, benefits greatly from Lyon's clear-headed description of the beginnings, peak and aftermath (including the re-interpretation) of film noir.