ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the aforementioned key terms: 'hard-boiled fiction' and 'crime thriller'. The texts included are: Murder at the National Gallery by the American crime fiction writer Margaret Truman; Il mistero del Caravaggio by Fabio Baldassarri; The Lost Painting by the American author Jonathan Harr; Saving Caravaggio by the British writer Neil Griffiths. It also includes The Art Thief by the young American scholar Noah Charney, one of the world's leading experts on art-crime and founding director of the Rome-based international Association for Research into Crimes against Art; and 2008 novel by the Italo-French author Gilda Piersanti, Jaune Caravage. The idea of darkness is further explored in the film noir, both technically and thematically, through the use of lighting, by creating or emphasizing shadows on the screen, which is why Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets. The chapter points out that the connection between the hard-boiled genre and the film/'Roman' noir through the analysis of Scorsese's Mean Streets.
