"Year One" and most of the Legends of the dark knight issues pretty much felt like fairly realistic, "noirish" crime-stories but the regular mags still had the more goofy villains and the Gotham-vibe you are referring to.

BTW, any "recent" (like past ten years) Batman-paperbacks worth reading? They have closed the only comic-book store that covered imports here and our library-which of course is years behind and don't take in too much is closed until december so I'm TOTALLY out of the loop when it comes to comics which I don't want to be but it's very difficult here in sweden nowadays to be a comic-fan and the discussions on PTP might as well be in sumerian to me because I don't recognize anything...

My favorite Batman ever outside of mini-series and one-shots is the 70's Denny O'Neill/Neal Adams stuff I grew up on as a kid (sweden were always years behind the US when it came to comics) as well as the Steve Englehart/Marshall Rogers and Jim Aparo shit from roughly the same era.