...the title novelist James Elroy once gave San Franciscan writer Eddie Muller. He writes books about films, more specifically film noir (hence the name). I was thinking that reading up on some of his works might be an interesting starting place for my project.
"If a private eye is hired by an old geezer to prove his wife's cheating on him and the shamus discovers long-buried family secrets and solves a couple of murders before returning to his lonely office - that's detective fiction. If the same private eye gets seduced by the geezer's wife, kills the old coot for her, gets double-crossed by his lover and ends up shot to death by his old partner from the police force - I can say with complete assurance: you are wallowing in NOIR."
Came across this quote of his whilst hunting for secondary research in the form of a black and white film - one that I can bare to watch! My mother informs me that I have always hated them and that I frequently insisted that she didn't make me watch "one of those grey films" as a child. I figure if I can read a film noir it saves me the distress and the torture of an hour and a half of colourless adventures. God bless you Eddie Muller.
But on a more serious note, I think that this way I would be looking more closely at the qualities of the leading lady and designing for that customer, rather than creating a period costume directly referenced from something I've seen in a film. But we'll see!
