Although I've written stories about Chicago and San Francisco, most of my work has taken place where I live in the Deep South. Right now I'm working on a new crime series set here in Mississippi and much of Infamous happens in Memphis during the Great Depression.

I'd like to say it's an original idea to move the crime novel out of the big city and into a Southern rural landscape. But I have to list a long line of great Noirs written long before I began to publish. The first great Southern Noir is William Faulkner's Sanctuary. The story begins with a lush frat boy and his date, Temple Drake, stumbling upon an old house in rural Mississippi overrun by toughs and a Memphis bootlegger named Popeye.

Crime is a strong theme in Light in August and takes center stage in Faulkner's terrific mystery, Intruder in the Dust. A brilliant novel about a wrongly convicted black man and the nephew of his attorney set to find the truth. This novel was published long before To Kill a Mockingbird and in my opinion far outweighs that story in complexity and depth. (Not to mention some great investigative work including the exhuming of a body and the matching of bullets.)

There is also little doubt that Flannery O'Connor is one of the best hardboiled stylist of all time. Wry, tough and darkly hilarious, you can't find a better noir short than "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

During the 1950s, the height of the pulp age, native Mississippian Elliot Chaze wrote some terrific noir including the classic, Black Wings Has My Angel. Black Wings has long been out of print and an original Fawcett paperback will run you about $400. But bootleg cheap printings can be found online. The novel is a hardboiled heist tale with maybe the most memorable snuffing of an femme fatale of all time. The story is haunting and moody and captures New Orleans and Mississippi with a dead-on feel.

Even though I was born and spent most of my life in Alabama, I've spent most of my writing career in Mississippi. One of the highlights of living in Oxford was becoming friends with the late Larry Brown. Larry was a retired Oxford firefighter who rose to literary fame in the 1990s with his tough, hardboiled short stories and novels including two crime classics: Father and Son and Joe.

Father and Son is the story of Glen Davis, a recently released con who returns to his small Mississippi town to raise hell and destroy all those who get in his way -- and a few who don't. One of the meanest scenes in all crime fiction comes when Glen visits a local juke joint and decides to crucify the bar mascot -- a small monkey. Glen is such a mean son of a bitch that he later wishes the animal were still alive so he kill it again.

Those two books are a must, not to mention Daniel Woodrell, the working Arkansas writer, who has perhaps greater fame among writers -- the true writer's writer -- than a mass audience. His books are dark, compelling and written with brilliance. The Death of Sweet Mister is an instant classic -- an overused expression that's all to true here. But my favorite of his work has to be the incredible Winter's Bone -- a book that mixed mythology and meth running. A book that rivals any work by Cormac McCarthy.

You could include McCarthy's dead-on noir, No Country For Old Men, here. But I believe Texas is its own genre, and for this short, hasty list, I'm including only the Deep South. (Same goes with the Cajun country of James Lee Burke.)

Anyone with any other titles that need to be recognized let me know.