Some of the Great Crime Fiction and Film Noir Locations

Some places just make the perfect crime fiction locations; it may be the cold atmosphere in which you can almost see the spirit of death within the air. This has always been true of London, and more recently New York in films like David Fincher’s Se7en and the Law and Order series.
Then there are hot settings in which crime mixes seamlessly with the debauchery under a full summer’s sun, here murder and drugs are often on the cards. So here are some of the great crime fictions, the characters who inhabit them, and the places they are set.
Los Angeles
You couldn’t ignore Phillip Marlowe in any list of crime characters; he is Raymond Chandler’s persevering protagonist and indispensable in the Noir canon.
Chandler went a great way to make LA the home of sleaze and dodgy dealings and bodies turning up. It has carried on in this tradition ever since Chandler first started writing with Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard and even very recently with the Lethal Weapon films and the Robert Downey Jar vehicle Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Her Los Angeles is still awash with seedy goings on and no one is who they appear to be, fitting enough for a town full of actors. While in fiction James Ellroy has been painting the town as one of perverts freaks and juiceheads.
But to get to the best you maybe have to go to the original, and this is it. Phillip Marlowe is never shocked by what he sees, he knows his city too well, knows to expect the unexpected. The Big Sleep is a labyrinthine tale which twists and twists to a point beyond comprehension. Famously the director of the film adaptation, Howard Hawks, was at a loss to explain this most complicated of plots.
Miami
Miami finds itself as a more comical setting in crime fictions. This is consistently written about by Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen, the latter portraying it as a pantomime of New Money and stupidity.
Here is the home of Miami Beach condos, owned by small time crooks and hack plastic surgeons. In fiction and films it has become an emblem of distaste, where your unsophisticated crook may choose to hide out before finding some grizzly demise.
Miami is a jet set town, full of partying and recreation, indeed it is mostly a tourist retreat, with many of the houses here being second or even third homes.
Now it has got decidedly grizzlier, though retains that dark humour with television’s Dexter in which we follow a conflicted serial killer working for the police.
London
London has always been a dark and treacherous setting at night, with many films taking their cues from the grim Ripper days. With its alleyways and dark streets it is perfect for those noises in the distances and dark figures scurrying off.
Arthur Conan Doyle shaped the London aesthetic with Sherlock Holmes, as the town plays host to sinister goings on and elaborates plots, all waiting to be solved in the indefatigable gentleman detective.