Many of the great film noir movies were based on novels by the so-called “hardboiled” school of pulp writers, who told tales of cynical detectives, femme fatales, gangsters and gun molls in magazines like “Black Mask.” Some of the writers who began with the pulp magazines in the 1920s through the 1940s went on to write full-length novels in the same genre. In the 1950s and 1960s, another generation of hardboiled writers wrote exclusively for the cheap paperback market, and some of these books were later made into neo-noir movies- like 2010's “The Killer Inside Me,” based on the novel by Jim Thompson.