film noir
May 4, 2009
- My new novel, “A Pure Double Cross,” is my first icy plunge into the dark world of hardboiled fiction. When I searched the web I was surprised to find very few websites devoted to the field. I mentioned this to my fellow mystery writer Stephen Smoke. He didn’t share my surprise. “Hardboiled fiction is a dead genre,” he said. Hardboiled fiction, dead? How can such a classic part of the ...
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March 2, 2009
- I am submitting an old paper for a film symposium at Rider. Thought I'd post it. Masculine Impairment in Double Indemnity and The Last SeductionFilm noir began as a movement in the 1940s known for its dark themes and innovative visual style. The film noir movement was rediscovered in the 1970s and then again, in the 1990s. The postmodern noirs of the 1990s differ from the classical period ...
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January 27, 2009
- Does it get any better than that? And before any overly-zealous censors start affixing their asterisks to my "d*cks", please realize I'm not talking about any old "d*cks" here. No, I'm talking about that particular breed of private detective who graces the pages of Chandler and Hammett and who lives and dies in a blaze of celluloid glory on the big screens of yore. ...
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August 30, 2008
- In the first Hector Lassiter novel, Head Games, Hector visited his old friend Orson Welles on the set of Welles’ noir classic Touch of Evil. It was noted in Head Games (set in 1957) that Hector owed Orson a favor connected to something that happened between them ten years earlier. Toros & Torsos reveals what went down between the two a decade before — specifically, in January 1947 ...
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August 2, 2008
- Starting yesterday, Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley is hosting a month long film noir retrospective to celebrate David Goodis. Life with Goodis is about as dark and bleak as it gets. Years ago I went on a roman noir tear, and read Goodis, among others. There’s something mildly addictive about good noir. It might have something to do with confirming the inevitable fact that life is not ...
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July 30, 2008
- I wish I had arms like these. No really. This Sean Phillips guy drew me into the newest issue of the Marvel/Icon comic Criminal and he drew me with really big guns there choking a dude out in a diner. Check it out: 20-inch pythons. Image: Sean Phillips. Yeah, it’s the comic book version of me so of course it doesn’t have the big man boobs and short little arms that I’m currently accursed ...
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July 29, 2008
- On this morning, I am drinking cold coffee, listening to the pigeons coo and make love on my window sill. Down Geary Street, a man is ranting passionately, but I cannot make out what he is saying. A car growls in my ear, and there is the odd whistle or siren. Soon it will be Noon, and an insistent recorded voice, over-miked and over amplified, will shout: "THIS is a Test! This is A ...
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July 16, 2008
- I went to a party last night and met a lot of interesting people. Someone asked me about the kind of books I write and when I said, "Crime fiction," he remarked, "You must see a lot of films for research." Well, he was right, but only partly so. I see a lot of films, but not for research. A good film often spurs me to write just as reading a good book often does. What I ...
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