Best Local Noir Fiend

As Fog City's leading authority on film noir, historian and novelist Eddie Muller is the man to call when it comes to "guns and gams," as he puts it in the introduction to his lavish coffee-table book, The Art of Noir. The author of such genre references as Dark Cityand Dark City Dames as well as a series of crime novels (Shadow Boxer and The Distance), Muller is an old pro at evoking the shadowy world of frayed-but-honest gumshoes and double-dealing femmes fatales. As a place where weirdos and freaks of all stripes come to change their identities and create new lives for themselves, San Francisco is the embodiment of the noir aesthetic. The city's served as the setting for many a dark film, a fact that Muller celebrates with Noir City: The San Francisco Film Noir Festival, an annual retrospective from the 1940s and '50s.