Black Lizard (publisher)
| Parent company | Creative Arts Book Company |
|---|---|
| Status | Defunct |
| Founded | 1984 |
| Founder | Barry Gifford |
| Successor | Vintage Crime/Black Lizard |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | Berkeley, California |
| Publication types | Books |
| Fiction genres | Mystery |
Black Lizard was an American book publisher. It was founded in 1984. A division of the Creative Arts Book Company of Berkeley, California, Black Lizard specialized in presenting rediscovered forgotten classic crime fiction writers and novels from the decades between the 1930s and the 1960s. Creative Arts Book Company was founded by Don Ellis in 1966. Creative Arts filed for bankruptcy protection in 2003.
Creative Arts was best known for its Black Lizard imprint. Founded and edited by writer Barry Gifford, Black Lizard released over ninety books between 1984 and 1990, including reprints of classic novels by Charles Willeford, David Goodis, Peter Rabe, Harry Whittington, Dan J. Marlowe, Charles Williams, and Lionel White, as well as original novels by Barry Gifford and Jim Nisbet. Lizard is single-handedly responsible for renewing the interest in pulp master Jim Thompson in the late 1980s, long after his death, which resulted in several film adaptations of his novels. The original series were mass-market paperbacks with covers drawn by Kirwan.
Barry Gifford's relationship with Black Lizard is also sometimes credited with having first applied the term noir fiction to a certain subgenre of hardboiled fiction. Thus, in an introduction written by Gifford to the Black Lizard editions of Jim Thompson's novels in 1984, Gifford writes: "The French seem to appreciate best Thompson's brand of terror. Roman noir, literally 'black novel,' is a term reserved especially for novelists such as Thompson, Cornell Woolrich and David Goodis. Only Thompson, however, fulfills the French notion of both noir and maudit, the accursed and self-destructive. It is an unholy picture that Thompson presents. As the British critic Nick Kimberley has written, 'This is a godless world,' populated by persons 'for whom murder is a casual chore.'" Gifford's use of the term noir in this context resulted in a term that is narrower in scope than that used by the French roman noir as applied to fiction.
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