Bookseller Profile: Royal Books

Kevin Johnson, the owner of Royal Books in Baltimore, is a man of many talents. Aside from being one of the America's top sellers of collectible modern first editions, Kevin has just released his first book – The Dark Page: Books That Inspired American Film Noir 1940-1949.

A former government civil servant and a one-time musician, Johnson describes Film Noir as a style rather than a genre. For most of us, Film Noir is seen in gritty black and white crime dramas with doomed anti-heroes and downbeat endings, but the style has stretched across westerns, science fiction, romance and other genres.

Ideal for bibliophiles, collectors and movie buffs, The Dark Page is a comprehensive guide to 160 books, featuring full-page 9x12 three-dimensional images of the true first editions that inspired movies but The Dark Page also salutes the screenwriters and directors that turned the stories into Film Noir Silver Screen classics.

"Film Noir stretches from about 1940 to 1965 but I've tried to cover the first 10 years," said Johnson. "Prior to 1940, you saw movies about detectives like Sherlock Holmes where there were tidy endings and everybody was happy again. The Maltese Falcon was probably the first detective picture in the Film Noir vein."

Film Noir came about through a remarkable combination of events. In the 1920s and 1930s, so called 'hardboiled' crime novels had become popular with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett leading the way, and these were eventually adopted by Hollywood in the 1940s. Hollywood also saw a huge influx of influential German filmmakers eager to escape the Nazis and they brought the expressionist style seen in German cinema. The final influence was the world-weary malaise experienced by America after emerging from a second world war.

Bizarrely, the initial spark for Johnson's book was about children's foods.

"Two or three years ago, I was at a party and a guy had a book called Krazy Kids' Food," he said. "It was full of great images of these cereal boxes from the 1950s and 1960s, and that was during a sugar craze in America when all kinds of insane things were being tried out. That era's gone now and I thought the book was a neat idea - it was all about nostalgia.

"I wanted to do something that was much more than just a bibliography of sources for Film Noir. I decided to create a bibliography on the left-hand page and use full-page pictures of the books that inspired the movies on the right-hand facing page."

A typical example from the book is Three of a Kind by James M Cain which contains the novella that was used as the basis for Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder from a screenplay written by Wilder and Chandler. The doomed fate of the narrator is established at the very start of the movie so a sense of failure is cast over the entire film. The movie was one of the first to use flashback as a key narrative tool.

From books that were made into movies of the same name, The Dark Page features Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Chandler's The Big Sleep, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, The Great Gatsby, and many more instantly recognizable titles. However, the full page images of books, both well known and obscure, from a truly bygone era immediately capture the reader's eye.

"The hardest part of putting the book together was finding the images of the true first editions. In the last mile before the book was published, there were still many missing," said Johnson. "I got some from booksellers, the Bodleian Library in Oxford found one for me and I got to the stage where only one book remained – The Mills of God by Ernst Lothar from 1935 which inspired the movie, An Act of Murder.

"I used a system called OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) which is a giant online catalog of what books are held by libraries. I found a single copy in a library in New Zealand and then called them up, and they did, indeed, have the book. I asked "Does the book have its dust jacket?" and the lady replied "You mean the paper thing around the book?" She scanned the cover for me and emailed it to me as an attachment, but I was trembling on the phone during the conversation."

Johnson's love of Film Noir dates back to childhood when his father took him to the movies in the 1970s – however, Disney was not on the menu. "He took me to films he wanted to see so I saw Serpico, The Godfather, The Last Picture Show – all adult movies and that era is now regarded with a critical fervour. Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola were making these incredible movies. I hold my Dad responsible."

The foreword to The Dark Page is written by Paul Schrader – the script writer of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull – who was wrote an influential essay, Notes on Film Noir, about the style in 1971. The essay helped revive critical interest in a style of cinema that had been forgotten.

"My favourite examples of Film Noir are when a completely obscure book led to a movie," said Johnson. "For instance, Orson Welles' The Lady From Shanghai was inspired by If I Die Before I Wake by Sherwood King. Another example would be Detour by Martin Goldsmith which became a movie. High Wall by Alan R Clark was made into a movie of the same name."

Although we see parodies of Film Noir in many areas of popular culture from commercials to movies like Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, fans of modern cinema are frequently treated to examples of Film Noir. Quentin Tarantino, creator of Reservoir Dogs, is "hyper aware of Film Noir," according to Johnson. Roman Polanski's Chinatown is another modern example. A film like The Grifters, starring John Cusack, Annette Bening and Angelica Huston, would be another modern example – a movie inspired by a 'hardboiled' novel from 1963 by Jim Thompson.

Royal Books - which offers first editions of modern literature, crime fiction, science fiction, film, photography, art and music - has been in existence since 1997. Johnson, bored by his day job as a civil servant, began selling books in his evenings and then eventually ran the business out of his home. He then opened an appointment-only warehouse and, in 2001, he had the opportunity to purchase a well established bookstore in Baltimore and he hasn't looked back.

His next task is to write a book addressing Film Noir in the 1950s – a decade shaped by the McCarthy trials and fear of communism.

To learn more about Film Noir, Kevin Johnson recommends...

"Film Noir by Andrew Spicer, a Brit, is perfect for the 101 on Film Noir. I'd also recommend Dark City: The Film Noir by Spencer Selby for an exhaustive book about the style."