Category Archives: Crime fiction

Parker and the art of hard-boiled crime writing

Posted on December 21, 2010 by Andrew Nette| 5 Comments

December 31 2010 marks the second anniversary of the death at age 75 of one of the masters of hard-boiled crime writing, Donald Westlake.

I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Westlake lately and his best known creation, the professional criminal Parker.

Westlake was a prolific writer. While he specialised in crime fiction, he also did science fiction, erotic stories and westerns under a myriad of pseudonyms of which Richard Stark, the name he used for the Parker books, remains the best known. He also worked on a number of screenplays, including the adaption of Jim Thompson’s The Grifters.

Sixteen Parker novels appeared between 1962 and 1974. For reasons I’m not clear about, Westlake took a rest from the character until 1997, then wrote another eight Parker books.

Several of the books were filmed, the best known of which is Point Blank starring Lee Marvin (later remade as Payback with Mel Gibson as the lead, but the less said about it the better).

I recently discovered via The Violent World of Parker website, The Outfit, an excellent 1973 adaption of Westlake’s novel of the same name, is finally getting an outing on DVD. (The details are here).

Robert Duvall does the honours as Parker or Macklin, as the central character in the film is called, alongside Joe Don Baker, Robert Ryan and the siren of seventies American B-movies, Karen Black.… Read more

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Posted in 1970s American crime films, Crime fiction, Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark, Garry Disher, Heist films, Jim Brown, Lee Marvin, Noir fiction, Parker

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Interview: Garry Disher

Posted on December 2, 2010 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

Garry Disher is a veteran of the Australian crime-writing scene. He is the author a series of books featuring the professional hold-up man known as Wyatt. Disher wrote six Wyatt novels in the nineties and a seventh was recently released by Text and took out the top prize in the 2010 Ned Kelly awards. Disher has also authored a number of books featuring Hal Challis and Ellen Destry, two police working on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsular, about an hour’s drive southeast of Melbourne, where Disher also lives. I talked to him for the issue 5 of Crime Factory about the difference between writing hard-boiled characters and police procedurals, why after over a ten-year break he decided to write another Wyatt book and the state of crime fiction in Australia.

It’s been over 10 years since the last Wyatt book, Fallout in 1997. Why the break and what inspired you to give Wyatt another outing after such a long time?

The break was to try and get established with the new series of police procedurals, the Challis and Destry books, which for me was a completely different way of looking at plot and structure. I wanted a break from Wyatt because there was basically one book a year and I thought I might get stale on them.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Crime fiction, Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark, Garry Disher, Interviews, Parker

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Redback

Posted on November 23, 2010 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Redback is a fast paced thriller with a distinct pulp spy fiction feel from one of the newest players on the Australian publishing scene, genre specialists Clan Destine Press.

It opens on a small Pacific island, where ex-Australian army commander Bryn Gideon and her team of retrieval agents, known as the Redbacks, are attempting to rescue hostages being held by local rebels. It’s the first but by no means the last time in the book that things don’t go as planned with bloody results.

The story moves to Tokyo where American investigative journalist Scott Dreher thinks he is onto the story of his life about a revolutionary manga combat simulation computer game that has been pirated and is being used to train terrorists. This quickly takes a turn for the worse when its creator is killed, turning Dreher into a fugitive from the knife-wielding assassin.

What follows is a sequence of apparently unrelated events, including bombings in Europe and America and an assassination in Sydney. Gideon, her Redbacks and Dreher soon find themselves in a common quest to unmask a larger conspiracy on the part of a shadowy international criminal mastermind.

Without giving too much away, the plot of Redback bounces between a number of locations, including Pakistan, France and Thailand, and introduces a host of characters, including rightwing American extremists and mysterious terrorists cum criminals.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Crime fiction, Lindy Cameron

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Book review: The Wandering Ghost

Posted on November 19, 2010 by Andrew Nette| 5 Comments

GhostI glanced at the Martin Limon novels featuring Sueno and Bascom on bookshop shelves for years before finally deciding to crack one open and give it a try.

I’m really glad I did. After reading his first book, Jade Lady Burning (1992), I accidentally jumped three books to his 2007 novel, The Wandering Ghost. It was interesting to see how the series had developed.

Sueno and Bascom are officers in the Criminal Intelligence Division of the United States military, based in South Korea in the early seventies. The Vietnam War is waging, but it’s a sideshow when you’re on the beat in a country still technically at war with its northern neighbour.

For the most part, the South Korea depicted in Jade Lady Burning is cold, bleak, authoritarian and paranoid; the perfect backdrop for a couple of hard-boiled investigators to ply their trade.

A lot of the action is set amongst the bars and brothels that have sprang up to cater to the US military presence. Limon’s not the first writer to focus on what Western men do in Asia but his handling of the subject matter is vastly superior to most of what’s out there, focusing as it does on the culture clash that occurs when so many young men with money, most of them barely educated, are thrown in the middle of an ancient and very hierarchical society.… Read more

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Posted in Book Reviews, Crime fiction, Crime fiction and film from South Korea, Martin Limon

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Guns, geezers, girls and terrorists

Posted on November 7, 2010 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

DTK Molise is a blogger and crime fiction enthusiast who splits his time between London, Zurich and Kabul. His excellent site, Kabul Noir, looks at the dark side of life in the Afghan capital, including the connections between crime and politics.

I recently asked him to locate and review crime fiction set in Afghanistan. Given its history and everything that continues to happen in that troubled country, you’d have thought there’d be numerous crime writers basing stories there. Think again.

What follows is his review of two of the few books he found, A Hostile Place by John Fullerton (Macmillan, 2003) and The Network by Jason Elliot (Bloomsbury, 2010). I want to thank DTK Molise for doing these reviews and I look forward to him filling the void in crime fiction in this part of the world.

Whether the story is focused on corruption, terrorism, military activities, or top-secret papers being published by WikiLeaks, Afghanistan is rarely out of the news.

The country is awash with stories and as result the western public is kept up-to-date on the daily happenings in what should by all accounts be an obscure Central Asian Republic marginally better known than Kyrgyzstan.  Communist coups, decades of war, the final nail in the Soviet Union’s coffin, the growth of the Taliban, and now the seemingly never-ending military occupation led by NATO have all helped to create the sense that Afghanistan is an important country.… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction

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