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The One-Line Review (Free subscription) | 11/09/2009
USA Feature Film Director: Gordon Douglas Writers: Harry Brown, Horace McCoy Cinematographer: Peverell Marley Composer: Carmen Dragon Cast: James Cagney, Barbara Payton, Helena Carter, Ward Bond, Luther Adler, Barton MacLane, Steve Brodie, Rhys Williams, Herbert Heyes Adapted form Horace McCoy’s novel, this Cagney Production - in which a vicious sociopath escapes from a prison work detail, and...
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The blog Film (Free subscription) | 08/07/2009
The novelist and screenwriter wrote two of the most scathing fictional denunciations of Hollywood ever penned – and, in a genre that has long dripped with bile and venom, that's really saying something The passing of Budd Schulberg at the age of 95 is the end of a cinema era. The son of BP Schulberg, who became head of Paramount in the 1930s, he was raised at the heart of the studio system....
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roGER's RaNtS (Free subscription) | 06/22/2009
Saturday morning, and in search of a small (i.e lightweight) book to read on the train, I dug out my copy of Horace McCoy's classic, first published in 1936 in the midst of the great depression. It's a curious minor work; part experimental fiction and part dime store trash. At 122 pages it's also short in way that most novels today (sadly) aren't. It's a simple sad tale of two out of work actors, Michael...
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Blackadelic Pop (Free subscription) | 06/04/2009
One of the coolest things about the internet is meeting folks with common interests whom become real friends though you've never met. In the case of my man fifty grand, prolific writer Garry Phillips, we not only became buddies, but he also put me down with one of last years dopest book projects The Darker Mask: Heroes From the Shadows, which he co-edited with "representing D.C." Christopher...
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Who Walk In Brooklyn (Free subscription) | 04/21/2009
Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn Who is Winsor McCay and why is he saying such terrible things about me? Why did I, Caz Dolowicz, just awake from a dream of a rarebit fiend? (She looked eerily like Mae West.) How did Windsor McCay die and when? What did he think of John Y. McKane, or did he [...]
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Crime Always Pays (Free subscription) | 04/12/2008
What burns within WHAT BURNS WITHIN is Sandra Ruttan. There is, among the six or seven sub-plots, a story about arson, and the title could also refer to personal hells, but what really burns, with a cold intensity, is Ruttan’s seriousness, the clarity of her intent, the laser-like precision she brings to the process of saying that the truth is subjective and the universe is pitilessly indifferent,...
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Crime Always Pays (Free subscription) | 02/24/2008
The Daily Telegraph ran a feature on Saturday entitled ‘50 Crime Writers To Read Before You Die’, and we’re still not sure if we should laugh or cry. Yes, we’ve always had a sneaking fondness for GREAT EXPECTATIONS as a noir-ish tale – but Charles Dickens as a crime writer? Hmmmmm ... Happy days for The Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman , who gets the following entry:...
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The Rap Sheet (Free subscription) | 10/30/2007
Because we have yet to come up with some similarly clever idea, we’re a bit envious of those crime-fiction-related blogs that boast weekly features, such as Nathan Cain's Wednesday “paperback porn” covers at Independent Crime and Duane Swierczynski’s “Monday Moment of Noir” entries at his Secret Dead Blog, that rarely fail to entertain. The latter has been attracting...
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Secret Dead Blog (Free subscription) | 10/28/2007
"Big as a telephone book" is a cliche, but you don't understand. This is as big as a telephone book. It not a book to be carried; it is a book to be transported. When you open it somewhere in the middle, the weight falls on your hands and makes you think you're holding two separate books. Fact is, The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps was originally published as three separate books, each of...
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Secret Dead Blog (Free subscription) | 05/17/2007
Though it is Dick in a book. The Library of America, which has previously waved its magic wand over the heads of Chandler, Hammett, Jim Thompson, Horace McCoy, David Goodis, Patricia Highsmith and Charles Willeford—some of my favorite dead writers— now does the same for Philip K. Dick . Guest editor Jonathan Lethem has gathered four of Dick's best 1960s-era novels (including my personal,...
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