Category Archives: Crime fiction

Crime Factory 8 is live

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Crime Factory 8 is now out and available here.

Highlights include an interview with the author of De Luxe, Lenny Bartulin, and Tokyo Vice, Jake Adelstein.

There’s short fiction from Seth Harwood, Health Lowrance (whose book, The Bastard Hand, I reviewed on this site recently), and Julia Madeleine.

My column on Asian crime fiction and film, Setting Sun, looks at the 1981 noir Cutter’s Way, and the 1978 film, Who’ll Stop the Rain, both of which dealt with the legacy of the Vietnam War. Cutter’s Way is based on Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg whose death earlier this year went largely unnoticed. Who’ll Stop the Rain is adapted from Robert Stone’s wonderful 1974 book, Dog Soldiers.

There’s also reviews, the Nerd of Noir, our True Crime Factory column and a whole lot more.

Check it out.

And while I’m on the subject, big things are going down at on the Factory floor. We’e currently re-designing our website and have got a number of other projects on the go. It’s top secret, hush hush and all that, so you’ll have to watch this space as details are slowly revealed over the coming months.

 … Read more

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Posted in Crime Factory, Crime fiction, Noir fiction

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Book review: Dust Devils

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

You can bet crime writer Roger Smith is not on the Christmas card list of the South African Tourist Board. His third novel, Dust Devils, is one of the most violent and blistering crime novels I’ve read in a long while. It’s also a pretty bleak picture of post-Apartheid South Africa.

The plot kicks off with a home invasion that leaves one man dead and his female companion running for her life.

She happens to be the wife of sacked journalist Robert Dell. Within a few pages, their car has been run of the road, the wife and two young children have been incinerated and Dell, thrown clear of the blast, is being fitted up by corrupt police to take the blame as a murder/suicide.

The killer, a Zulu called Inja Mazibuko, is a psychopathic cop attached to special unit of the corrupt Minister of Justice. Dell is a loose end that he must now tidy up.

Dell escapes with the help of the father, Robert Goodbread, a former CIA black operative involved in Vietnam and the former South Africa’s dirty little border wars.

Recently released from jail where he was serving a sentence for taking part in the massacre of black civilians, Goodbread is dying of lung cancer and despised by his son.… Read more

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Posted in Book Reviews, Crime fiction, Crime fiction and film from Africa, Malla Nunn, Roger Smith

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SheKilda and women’s crime writing in Australia

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

It’s when someone asks you to contribute a blog post on the state of female crime writing in Australia from the point of someone watching the industry, that you realise you just don’t read enough.

Not nearly enough.

That said, in my view, female crime writing in this country looks in rude health.

Exhibit A is SheKilda this weekend, the women’s crime writing conference I’ve been asked to write this blog post to coincide with. There’ll be 60 speakers spanning fiction, true crime, young adult, ‘crimance’ and screenwriting. With the exception of the Crime and Justice Festival, there’s nothing else like it.

The 53 books by local female writers entered in the current Davitt awards for female crime writing, is Exhibit B.

It’s when you make statements like these that you come up against claims female crime writers are discriminated in reviewing and awards. Certainly, studies overseas have shown that female writers are vastly underrepresented in the review sections of newspapers. I presume the same is true here.

Awards? Let’s look at the top categories for the last ten years of the Ned Kelly Awards, 2002 – 2011.

The results are fairly split in the category of true crime. Five women have won it (it was tied between two women in 2007) and five men (with the result being tied between two men in 2002).… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Crime fiction, Kerry Greenwood, Lindy Cameron, Malla Nunn

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Psycho preacher alert: Heath Lowrance’s The Bastard Hand

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 3 Comments

Ever since seeing Robert Mitchum as Harry Powell in the 1955 classic, Night of the Hunter, I’ve had a thing for itinerant unbalanced evangelical preachers.

Which is one reason I enjoyed Detroit-based writer Heath Lowrance’s debut novel, The Bastard Hand, so much.

The book is narrated by Charlie, a drifter fresh out of a psychiatric care where he was put after killing a policeman. He’s having a few problems adjusting to post-institutional life, little things, like the fact his hands glow with the power of God in the presence of wrongdoers.

After getting mugged within hours of arriving in Memphis, Charlie befriends a Baptist Reverend called Phineas Childe, agreeing to accompany him to the town of Cuba Landing, where the Reverend will be working.

Although Childe is no match for Mitchum’s Powell in the killing stakes, he is nonetheless a lying, drinking, womanizing, sleazy opportunist who manages to be charming and menacing at the same time.

Lowrance takes the reader on a wild ride through the corruption and deceit that bubbles away beneath the surface of Cuba Landing. Along the way we meet some great characters, including a couple of backwoods moonshiners, a bent mayor and his cop flunky, and a stick up gang of crack heads.

The Bastard Hand is by turns a lurid hard-boiled suspense novel and an elegant piss take of evangelical religion and small town mores.… Read more

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Posted in Book Reviews, Crime fiction, Noir fiction, Robert Mitchum

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Pulp Friday: Headed for a Hearse

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

“His address was Death Row and his lease was up in six days… “

They don’t write cover blurbs like that any more.

Today’s Pulp Friday contribution is the 1960 UK Pan edition of the 1935 novel, Headed for a Hearse, by Jonathan Latimer.

Latimer was a crime reporter for newspapers in his native Chicago before going on to write a series of hard-boiled novels. He also worked in Hollywood where he wrote a number of screenplays, including The Glass Key (1942), The Big Clock (1948) and Nocturne (1946).

My parents had a good collection of Pan paperbacks on their bookshelf and I can remember, even as a very small child, being fascinated by the fantastic cover art.

The story sounds good, too.

“SIX DAYS to go before Westland would go to the electric chair for the murder of his wife…

SIX DAYS for him to sweat in the death cell – with a gangster and a fiend for company.

SIX DAYS for private investigator William Crane to flirt with death and to find the real killer…”

 

 … Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction, Pan Books, Pulp Friday, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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