Classic Noir Mystery and Detective

[angelastorm]

Classic Noir Mystery authors are not nearly as comprehensive as could be, and I have a ton of them to read. Rex Stout, Margery Allingham, John D. Macdonald, Ross MacDonald, Raymond Chandler and John Dickson Carr, LRW Wright are just suggestions. Dashiell Hammet, Aaron Elkins, Erle Stanley Gardner, Lord Dunsany, Steve Fisher. One of my favourite Librivox recordings has been E.W. Hornung's Raffles. Where do I initiate these, and more?

[TriciaG]

Copyright is your biggest obstacle.

I just grabbed one of the names you mentioned and threw it into Wikipedia. Ross Macdonald was born in 1915, so his works are not automatically in the public domain in the USA (that happens when they were published in 1922 or earlier).

The other way works can be public domain is if they were published in 1923-1963 and did NOT renew their copyright after 28 years. This is a very hard thing to prove, so we rely on two sources that do their research: gutenberg.org and hathitrust.org. If the works are on either of these two sites (on Gutenberg having "Public domain in the USA" in the "bibrec" tab, and on HathiTrust available as full view), then they're safely public domain and can be recorded for us.

[icequeen]

Reading your list, you have Lord Dunsany. I have done as many of his PD books as I could, check it out! https://librivox.org/author/17?primary_key=17&search_category=author&search_page=1&search_form=get_results