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January 24, 2015 at 12:07 pm

Miklitsch Book Nominated for Edgar Allan Poe Award

Dr. Robert Miklitsch, Professor of English at Ohio University, has been nominated for an Edgar award for the book “Kiss the Blood Off My Hands: On Classic Film Noir,” which he edited.

Miklitsch’s book is one of five nominees in the category “Best Critical/Biographical.”

The Mystery Writers of America announced the 2015 nominees in conjunction with the 206th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe. The Edgar Allan Poe Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction, and television published or produced in 2014, will be presented to the winners at the association’s 69th Gala Banquet on April 29 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, New York City.

“The Edgar nomination is particularly heartening for me as I’ve been trying for a number of years now to write books that speak to both an academic and general audience,” says Miklitsch.

“I’m quite fortunate in that the English Department at Ohio University has graciously supported my work over this period of time by allowing me to teach an upper-division course on classic and neo-noir, which has given me a sense of what general readers might be looking for. In fact, the curiosity and enthusiasm of the OU students in the various iterations of my film noir course have been a real inspiration,” he says.

“Since the College of Arts & Sciences also partially funded a professional indexer that freed me to focus on other aspects of the book, I owe a lot to OU!”

About Kiss the Blood Off My Hands

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands contains “white-hot essays on overlooked aspects of classic film noir,” according to the book jacket.

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands by Robert MiklitschAbstract: Consider the usual view of film noir: endless rainy nights populated by down-at-the-heel boxers, writers, and private eyes stumbling toward inescapable doom while stalked by crooked cops and cheating wives in a neon-lit urban jungle.

But a new generation of writers is pushing aside the fog of cigarette smoke surrounding classic noir scholarship. In Kiss the Blood Off My Hands: On Classic Film Noir, Robert Miklitsch curates a bold collection of essays that reassesses the genre’s iconic style, history, and themes. Contributors analyze the oft-overlooked female detective and little-examined aspects of filmmaking like love songs and radio aesthetics, discuss the significance of the producer and women’s pulp fiction, as well as investigate Disney noir and the Fifties heist film, B-movie back projection and blacklisted British directors. At the same time the writers’ collective reconsideration unwinds the impact of hot-button topics like race and gender, history and sexuality, technology and transnationality.

As bracing as a stiff drink, Kiss the Blood Off My Hands writes the future of noir scholarship in lipstick and chalk lines for film fans and scholars alike.

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