“Hard Case Crime, December 2020: Unlikely Masters” by Matthew Sorrento

NONFICTION: “On a few surprising releases from the noir fiction mainstay.”

“Winter’s Perdition” by Mark Krajnak

I got a rocks glass of rye, and some cold hash to finish, as snow starts to fly.No carols being sung around these parts. Will find it hard to sleep tonight. Winter’s perdition is here. Tough to sleep when you don’t know who’s going to come through the door with a gat in hand. Just […]

“The World Out There: from the Book Purgatory” by John Talbird

It has been a week since the first murders…. he looks slowly around the store, dark, still, and empty. Usually, William parks near the back of the lot in the Westabout strip mall so customers can have spaces closer to the door. In his four years of managing Book Purgatory, he has waged a never-ending […]

“From Witness to Victim: the Story of Donna Gentile” by Anita DeFrancesco

She was my first cousin. Her killer or killers are still at large today. And her autopsy was the first to be officially sealed in the City of San Diego. A young woman’s body was discovered off Sunrise Highway 30 miles east of San Diego County, in Mt. Laguna, California, set in the forest surrounded […]

“Alphaville (1965): Godard’s Noir Transformation” by Tony Williams

In the hybrid-noir Alphaville, fantasy, pulp fiction, and other influences all merge in Godard’s challenging process. Daphne du Maurier’s anonymous narrator opens Rebecca (1938) with the line, “Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderly again”. By contrast, I often fantasize about strapping up certain students in an auditorium and forcing them to watch Godard’s […]

“The Girlfriend Problem” by Matthew Sorrento

POETRY: “And I would kill for him, still would, ever since we met….”

“Worlds of Weird: Paul Green on Weird Detectives” by Ali Moosavi

Murdoch Mysteries (CBC, 2008- ) “So, what constitutes a ‘Weird Detective’? Some are legendary figures such as Professor Abraham Van Helsing, who is listed under Dracula as the ‘vampire hunter and occult detective‘ and Sherlock Holmes. Some are fiction characters belonging to real cases, such as Inspector Frederick Abberline, played by Johnny Depp in From […]

“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 […]