Woody Haut is an acknowledged master of American noir, theory and practice. He is the author of the novels Cry For a Nickel, Die For a Dime and Days of Smoke (Concord ePress) as well as Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War, Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction, and Heartbreak and Vine: the Fate of Hardboiled Writers in Hollywood. He lives in London.

Days of Smoke

A Novel by Woody Haut


The Summer of Love has come and gone, and now the streets of L.A. and San Francisco are filling up with charlatans, runaways, militants, and bad drugs. The war in Vietnam divides the nation. There’s revolution in the air after the slaying of Martin Luther King. And two star-crossed young lovers give in to an intoxicating, perilous freedom that takes them from folk coffeehouses to violent protests. Until one impulsive act of subversion upends their precarious world.

Picking up where Cry for a Nickel, Die for a Dime left off, noir master Woody Haut chronicles these fascinating days as only one who lived through them can. Days of Smoke is a hurtling fin d’epoch exploration of 1968, the year when all the glimmering possibilities began to burn out. 

 

 

 

“Haut, like Ellroy and Raymond Chandler before him, is obsessed with Los Angeles’s underbelly, its cold, rank substrata.” – Crime Factory


“Each elliptical phrase in Cry for a Nickel attempts to articulate what it was like to live through the final gasps of the 1950s, before the Catholic kid Kennedy was killed, and the 1960s began in earnest.”  – Los Angeles Review of Books (about Cry for a Nickel)