Category Archives: Book Reviews

The bleak, propulsive noir of Georges Simenon’s Romans Durs

Posted on February 18, 2022 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

If forced to nominate any positives at all out of the last two years of global pandemic, it is the increased time I’ve had to read. In the first year of Covid I made good on a long-standing desire to read John le Carré’s George Smiley books. A literary focus of 2021 was the work of the Belgium born writer, Georges Simenon. Simenon’s output was a staggering 400 novels, although some have claimed he wrote as many as 500. The best known of these is his acclaimed series of crime procedurals featuring the French police detective Jules Maigret, 75 of which appeared between 1931 and 1972 (Simenon died in 1989). But my interest in Simenon is in his other, somewhat more shadowy body of work, his so-called romans durs or ‘hard novels’: tightly plotted, intensely psychological, often quite slim stand-alone volumes that have so far yielded some of the best noir fiction I can remember reading.

My latest piece for the US site CrimeReads, on the bleak psychological noir of Simenon’s Romans Durs is live and can be read in full here.… Read more

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Posted in Book Reviews, Crime fiction, Georges Simenon, Noir fiction

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Dangerous Visions & New Worlds: the reviews so far & upcoming two-day City Lights SF symposium

Posted on January 30, 2022 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

It has been a couple of months since my latest collaboration with Iain McIntyre, Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950-1985, hit the shelves in the US, and a lot has been happening. So, a short update is in order.

The book, available via the publisher PM Press, as well as all other book selling platforms has been well received. It made The Washington Post’s list of best science fiction, fantasy and horror books for 2021, and was also postively reviewed – twice – on the influential science fiction site, Locus. Ian Mond wrote in one of these reviews that ‘With its gorgeous interiors and thoughtful, de­tailed essays, I know that Dangerous Visions and New Worlds will inform newbies like myself while providing those familiar with the subject matter a contemporary perspective on the New Wave’s radical antecedents and the influential foundational texts the movement produced’ (you can read Mond’s full review here).

Our book was generously reviewed in Forbes magazine, on one of my favourite sites, We Are the Mutants, and for Counterpunch. I was also a guest on the wonderful British podcast, Breakfast in the Ruins. You can listen to the discussion, which ranged from new wave science fiction, to Norman Jewison’s 1975 film Rollerball, and the wonder that is New English Library’s teensploitation novels of the 1970s, in full here.… Read more

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Posted in Book Reviews, Dangerous Visions and New Worlds Radical Science Fiction 1950 to 1985, Dystopian cinema, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp paperback cover art, Rollerball, Science fiction and fantasy

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My cultural highlights of 2021

Posted on December 20, 2021 by Andrew Nette| 6 Comments

In past years, I have always tried to conclude the writing year with wrap up of my top fiction/non-fiction reads. But this year I want to do something a little different and look more broadly at the culture that has sustained me in what has been another difficult and stressful 12 months, dominated, as it has for so many of us, by the Covid pandemic.

Film

As was the case in 2020, Covid meant that I spent far more time than I would’ve liked at home. So, most of the movies I watched had to be on the small screen. One of the standouts for me was a 1953 Argentinian retelling of Fritz Lang’s 1931 classic, M, called El Vampiro Negro or The Black Vampire. Helmed by one of Argentina’s most famous mid-century directors, Roman Vinoly Barreto, the story focuses the panic that engulfs Buenos Aires as children are stalked and murdered by a paedophile. Barreto particularly focuses on a nightclub singer and mother, played by Argentina’s equivalent of Marilyn Monroe, Olga Zubarry, who is the sole eyewitness to the child killer and who fears her daughter may be the next victim. Proof positive that classic noir was not just a North American phenomena, El Vampiro Negro is a powerful film, stunningly restored by the US Film Noir Foundation.… Read more

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Posted in 1960s American crime films, 1970s American crime films, Australian crime fiction, Australian crime film, Australian noir, Australian popular culture, Australian television history, Book Reviews, Crime fiction, Crime fiction and film from Latin and Central America, Crime film, Georges Simenon, Horror, Neo Noir, Noir fiction, Science fiction and fantasy, True crime

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Pulp Friday: Torn shirts & maneaters

Posted on October 29, 2021 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Today’s Pulp Friday post looks at two pulp-related projects that I think should be on your radar.

The first is Michael Stradford’s Steve Holland: The Torn Shirt Sessions. Many of you have probably have not heard of Steve Holland but if you collect pulp paperbacks, I can almost guarantee that you will have seen his face on covers that you have from the 1950s to the 1980s. Holland was one of the foremost paperback cover models over this period and certainly the most used male model I am aware of.

While I was familiar with Holland’s chiselled features from the cover art of numerous books in my possession long before I realised who he was, since learning his name it seems like I, literally, cannot go into second-hand bookshop or browse pulp art the internet without stumbling across him. He not only modelled for paperbacks, but for the covers of men’s adventure magazines and comic books, in every conceivable genre. In the process, he worked with some of the foremost pulp illustrators of the 20th century, including Mort Kunstler, Roger Kastel, and Ron Lesser, just to name a few.

One of the characters Holland is most closely associated with is Doc Savage, The Man of Bronze. A fictional character who first appeared in American pulp magazines in the 1930s, Doc Savage transitioned to the paperback format in the mid-1960s.… Read more

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Posted in Book Reviews, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp fiction set in Asia, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Book Review: The Real Diana Dors

Posted on September 8, 2021 by Andrew Nette| 5 Comments

One of the reasons I was interested in reading Anna Cale’s recently released biography of the late British actress Diana Dors, The Real Diana Dors, is that I was curious to test out what I thought I knew about Dors and the reality of her life. What I was pretty certain about, and Cale confirms, is that Dors was stereotyped from the beginning of her career as either the sultry femme fatale bad girl or, as she herself once wrote, ‘the flighty, sexy little thing who pops in and out of the story whenever a little light relief seems to be called for.’

What I didn’t know, that Cale’s book taught me, was what a determined, serious, and hard headed performer Dors was. She accumulated a hundred screen credits in a career that began with her first bit part in the 1947 crime drama, The Code of Scotland Yard, to her last film role, Steaming, which appeared in 1985, a year after she died at the age of just 54. She resisted attempts to stereotype when she could, and no doubt like a lot of post war actresses undoubtedly had the talent and drive to be even bigger if not for various factors, of which beginning her career in the morally conservative, sexually hypocritical Britain of the late 1940s and early 1950s, was a major one.… Read more

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Posted in Book Reviews, British crime cinema, British pulp fiction, Christopher Lee, Crime film, Diana Dors, Film Noir, Victor Mature, Westerns

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