Category Archives: Neo Noir

MIFF report back #2: Sunrise

Posted on August 4, 2015 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

Sunrise

A key question for me from Partho Sen-Gupta’s second feature film, Sunrise, which played as part of the 2015 Melbourne International Film Festival, is how does one make a gripping crime film out of a pervasive social problem like child trafficking? If this was indeed Sen-Gupta’s intention, I’m not sure he has entirely succeeded. That said, there is a lot to recommend it.

The narrative spine of Sunrise is fairly straightforward. Joshi is middle aged Inspector working in a poorly resourced unit of the Mumbai police. His life has been in tatters ever since a person or persons unknown kidnapped his young daughter, Aruna, in front of her school years ago. The crime has destroyed his wife’s sanity and threatens to do the same to him. Compounding his trauma is the fact that the unit he works in deals with other parents who have had similar experiences. Joshi and his colleagues are largely unable to help these people, usually because their resources and methods are no match for those of the criminals responsible for the disappearances.

Joshi spends his nights obsessively searching for Aruna. He thinks he sees her everywhere. One night he stumbles out of the torrential monsoon rain into a nightclub called Paradise. Through the crowd Joshi spies Aruna amongst a group of young girls dancing on stage.… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction and film from India, Crime film, Melbourne International Film Festival, Neo Noir

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Interview: New Jersey crime writer, Wallace Stroby

Posted on July 13, 2015 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

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Wallace Stroby was an award-winning journalist who quit his job as an editor at New Jersey’s Star-Ledger of Newark newspaper, to write crime fiction full time. A life long New Jersey native, he is the author of six books, of which his debut, The Barb Wire Kiss, was a finalist for the 2004 Barry Award for best first novel. His last three books, Cold Shot to the Heart, Kings of Midnight, Shoot the Woman First, feature the female professional criminal character, Crissa Stone. This is an edited version of an interview, which I conducted at Noir Con 2014 in Philadelphia, that originally appeared in issue 17 of Crime Factory. His latest Crissa Stone book The Devil’s Share, is out now.

Let’s start of with your recent books featuring the character of Crissa Stone. What was the inspiration behind writing these?

I always wanted to write a book from the point of a view of a career criminal. In my third novel, Gone ‘Til November, half of the book was from the point of view of an ageing black hit man but the main character was actually a woman, the only female sheriff’s deputy in a small town, a woman in a man’s world and I liked that idea. So coming off Gone ‘Til November I wanted to combine those two and do a story about a career criminal who was a woman in a man’s world.… Read more

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Posted in Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark, Fawcett Gold Medal Books, Garry Disher, Interviews, Neo Noir, Noir fiction, Parker, Pulp fiction, True crime, Wallace Stroby

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Pulp Friday: The Day of the Locust

Posted on July 10, 2015 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

Day of the LocustMost people are familiar with the 1975 John Schlesinger film, The Day of the Locust, starring Donald Sutherland, Burgess Meredith and Karen Black.

But long before it appeared in cinemas, The Day of the Locust was an influential novel by US author, Nathanael West. Today’s Pulp Friday offering is the 1957 edition of the novel by Bantam Books. I have no idea who did the stunning cover image for this paperback version.

Both the novel and the film are set during the Great Depression and focus on a young artist who comes to Hollywood and is soon sucked into a nightmare world of hustlers, struggling actors and actresses and various other low life denizens on the fringes of the movie business. It is often viewed as one of the best books written on the underbelly of the American dream.

Nathanael knew of what he was writing about in The Day of the Locust, having worked for a time as a screenwriter for RKO pictures.… Read more

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Posted in Neo Noir, Pulp fiction, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Book review: Hard Rain Falling

Posted on June 10, 2015 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

HardWhile the argument can be made that Don Carpenter’s 1966 novel Hard Rain Falling is one of the best American crime fiction debuts of the late 1960s, no longer can it be said to be one of the least known. At least not since 2009, when New York Review Books released Hard Rain Falling as part of its classics series, with a forward by no less a crime fiction eminence than George Pelecanos, who stated the book “might be the most unheralded important American novel of the 1960s.” Since then, Hard Rain Fallingand Carpenter’s work more generally has undergone a wider critical reappraisal.

It was a very different situation in 1995, when the then 64-year-old author, beset by financial woes and facing multiple health problems, committed suicide. One of nine novels Carpenter wrote, Hard Rain Falling was lauded by critics and other writers upon its release, leading to the well-worn description of Carpenter as a writer’s writer, but the book never reached a mainstream audience.

There is some debate as to whether Hard Rain Falling is a crime novel. I’ll let others argue over the fine-grained literary questions. The book is about crime, criminals, and prison. That’s enough for me.

Hard Rain Failing opens in eastern Oregon in 1923, with a liaison between a cowboy and a 16-year-old female runaway.… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction, Neo Noir

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The Nickel Ride

Posted on April 14, 2015 by Andrew Nette| 3 Comments

Thenickelride-RobertMulligan1974_zpscfd16d4c

Amid the well-deserved hype around the film version of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice was this interesting list of early seventies crime films set in California and its surrounds. One of these was a little known 1974 movie, which I re-visited recently after first seeing it years ago, The Nickel Ride.

Jason Miller (best known for his role in 1973 film, The Exorcist) is Cooper, a mid-level operative in the LA crime scene, who managers several downtown warehouses where the mob stash their stolen merchandise. This job has earned the nickname of ‘Key Man’ due to all the keys to various storage facilities he has to carry around. He is also involved in various other legal and illegal activities, including fixing fights, bail bonds and acting as a dispute solver of sorts for the members of downtown LA’s working class criminal milieu.

Cooper and his employers face a major problem. They are running out of space to store their pilfered goods and Cooper is under major pressure to finalise negotiations on large track of old commercial warehouse space that would be perfect for their needs. But there seems to be some sort of complication preventing him from closing the deal.

Cooper’s immediate boss, Carl (John Hillerman, instantly recognisable as Higgins in Magnum PI), is getting skittish and assigns Turner (Bo Hopkins), a cocky cowboy enforcer, to shadow him.… Read more

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Posted in 1960s American crime films, 1970s American crime films, Neo Noir

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