This is a very good book, and very different from the classic movie based on it. Its themes run hard through noir as a genre, through masculinity and femininity, and through the power to define life’s challenges.It is true noir, not a mystery. We know Dix Steele, the unsympathetic main character, to be a murderer, a serial murderer, from the beginning. The question is why, and what’s next?Dix is a returning WWII vet, a former fighter pilot. He comes to Los Angeles to sublet an apartment from an old college acquaintance, Mel Terriss.Taking over Terriss’ apartment, clothes, and car gives Dix a patina of status. He looks like any guy who's making it. But he’s not. He’s living off an allowance from his uncle while he ostensibly tries his hand at becoming a professional writer.None of this stuff is really working,What he actually does is play the role of a guy who's making it, biding time while he fails to write and while what money he has runs out.In the meantime he watches and thinks about women. Women fall into the same constellation of the guy not making it, resenting not making it, not being a somebody like he was when he was a fighter pilot during the war, and keeping up appearances. Women are out of reach, the women that the guys who are really making it make it with.On a reliable monthly cycle, the swirl of resentment, frustration, and misogyny boils over, and someone dies. A woman, strangled.Dix the former fighter pilot also enjoys the chase. He’s addicted to a downward spiral of suspicion and anger in the chase of a woman. And he’s drawn into a chase with his wartime buddy, Brub Nicolai, now a detective for the Los Angeles PD.The heart of the novel then flows and crashes through his game of cat and mouse with Brub (and Brub’s clever and perceptive wife, Sylvia) and his chase of his dreamgirl, Laurel Gray. Laurel may have her own faults, but she doesn’t deserve Dix. Her faults only serve to light Dix’s fuse.It’s got that great noir feel of nothing-good-can-come-of-this. And it doesn’t, not to give anything away, since it’s pretty clear from the beginning. Dix is flawed and self-destructive to the core, and it goes back through all the murders to the original in the series of women he didn’t make it with, Brucie in Scotland, before he returned to America from the war.When you read the novel, it’s as much a ride you’re getting on as a story you’re following. And since it’s written from Dix’s perspective, you get to go down the same black hole he’s going down.The movie version, like I mentioned, is really a different story. It was cut off at the knees by Joseph Breen and the Motion Picture Code. The serial murderer was out, and the probably innocent suspect was in.The misogyny survived, which we might want to reflect on a bit. “Woman” here is an opponent, an object of psychological struggle. You see it especially in Dix’s relationship with Brub’s wife Sylvia, as well of course as Laurel. He wrestles constantly, in his own mind, with what he thinks to be Sylvia’s suspicions. It begins the moment he meets her.Dix’s ill-fated relationship with Laurel is romantic by contrast, but romance here is also a psychological struggle, mainly Dix vs. Dix. Because it’s inside Dix, it’s a struggle between Dix and every woman, automatically. An opponent before she even enters the scene, as happened with Sylvia.In Dix’s mind, the relationship between men and women is a predator/predator relationship, and it becomes self-confirming as a threatened woman fights back.This is great noir stuff.Just to add, Megan Abbott’s Afterword is short but so straightforwardly incisive that it’s hard to review the book without borrowing from her. It’s well placed as an “afterword” — so don’t read it until you’ve read the book.