“Bad Girls, RIP” by Charles Pappas

They were hotter than acetylene torches in hell, sex kittens before Bardot or Barbarella….Who will pick up the mantle today? Imagine you are a young man in the 1950s. Every day from dawn till dark you soak in a Jacuzzi of magazines, newspaper, and TV imagery: mothers in aprons worrying about which laxative to uncork […]

“Noir Inside and Out: Two Retrospectives” by Kurt Brokaw

In The Killer Inside Me (2010), Winterbottom choreographs the brutality neat and clean; there isn’t a gasp or a clutch that isn’t in the book. Deep into Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me (2010), the indelibly accurate rendering of Jim Thompson’s most important novel, is a defining scene in an Oklahoma jailhouse. Sheriff Lou Ford […]

“Madison Avenue Noir” by Kurt Brokaw

“Madison Avenue is always putting new twists on old pretzels.” Look closely at the shootout in the rain-swept street directly above. It’s the final moments of a 1965 lost neo-noir, The Money Trap. This was the fourth and final pairing of Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth, who made three better known movies (Gilda, Affair in Trinidad, The Loves […]

“A Mother’s Heart” by Carol Smail

July 14, 2016, a phone call shared with love. So much love. That date will forever be embedded in my soul. “Hey Ma, I won’t be able to be with you tomorrow, but wanted to let you know I’ll be praying for you.” Yes GOD IS LOVE. The love of a mother is unconditional. In […]

“The Orth-Daly Case” by Ben Himmelfarb

Part 1 This was supposed to be a simple lookup. A “lookup” was the general name for the work I did. People called or emailed the library almost everyday asking me to do research. Even though I couldn’t always find the answers they wanted, I was duty-bound to try. I was the local history librarian […]

“Writing Saved My Life” by Chris Roy

I believe that 90% of creativity is putting in the work. Start with an idea and expand on it. It’s awful at first. Make revisions, additions, trim and polish, until the final product is a single piece of art that will dazzle and baffle and few will know how much work was put into it—most […]

“Hollywood Homicide in the Seventies: The Snake and Bake Murder” by Steve Hodel

I applied at city hall for both LAPD and the sheriff’s department. Two weeks after I had passed both entrance exams and had been rejected by the sheriff’s department at the in-person interview for being too young, I was called in for my oral at LAPD. That went better. I fit their job description as […]