Red Harvest

An unnamed private dick shows up in a town known as Poisonville, and tries to clean it up from the crooked politicians and gangsters running it.

What set this apart from a lot of noir, for me, was that while it's pessimistic, its not at all misanthropic, which was a nice change. It also did a good job of advancing a social argument that evil sometimes isn't something that arises in the individual, but rather is something that a place can inflict on a person. That's an interesting idea, and one worthy of further development within the genre, I think. It's also somewhere where Red Harvest would have benefited from being a longer book - it clocks in at under 200 pages, which memans that there isn't too much time available for rny sense of morality more developed than “Sometimes pepople are evil, and when they are they just need a killing to set themselves straight.”