Category Archives: Neo Noir

Pulp Friday: Newton Thornburg’s heist novel, Knockover

Posted on May 30, 2014 by Andrew Nette| 5 Comments

Knockover

“The scheme was so perfect, the take was so big, you couldn’t ask for anything more-but one of them did.

I’ve got a little gem of a Pulp Friday today, the very rare Australian release of Newton Thornburg’s little known heist novel, Knockover.

Although he was a great success in the seventies, the peak period of his literary output, Thornburg kept a low profile in successive decades. So much so that when he died in 2011, it took a month before the first proper literary obituary appeared.

He is best known for the 1976 novel, Cutter and Bone. While I love the book and the 1981 movie version, Cutter’s Way (and which I reviewed on this site here), I have a preference for, To Die In California, a 1973 novel about a father’s investigation into the murder of his son in post-Summer of Love Los Angeles.

Knockover, Thornburg’s second book was originally published by Fawcett Gold Medal in 1968. Thornburg said he wrote Knockover explicitly with the hope of a movie sale in mind. Apparently the rights were optioned but nothing ever came of it. The story revolves around a former advertising executive, Cross, who puts together a team of criminals to pull off an armoured car robbery.… Read more

→ 5 Comments

Posted in Australian pulp fiction, Crime fiction, Neo Noir, Newton Thornburg, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art

Tagged , , , , , ,

MIFF progress report #3: A Touch of Sin and Call Girl

Posted on August 5, 2013 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

call-girl-posterThe third and final part of my report back from the 2013 Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) looks at the Chinese film A Touch of Sin and Call Girl, a Swedish neo noir set in the early seventies.

First up, Call Girl. Apparently based on actual events, this 2012 thriller was one of the real surprises for me at MIFF.

Sweden is in election mode and it is seven days before the nation goes to the polls. It’s a universe away from Iris and her best friend Sonja, two young juvenile delinquents sent to live in a home for troubled youths.

The home has virtually zero supervision and the young people seem free to come and go at all hours of the day and night. Remember this is Sweden in the early seventies, an ultra permissive, self proclaimed social democratic paradise where the authorities are thinking about decriminalizing certain types of incest and the cops crack jokes about capitalism.

Tthrough a series of unfortunate interactions the two girls find themselves drawn into the orbit of a procurer for the sex trade called Dagmar and her creepy sidekick and lover, Roy.

Dagmar runs a call girl operation. Not just any call girl racket. Her clients include senior civil servants, politicians (including the Minister of Justice) and police.… Read more

→ Leave a comment

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

Tagged , , , , ,

MIFF 2013 progress report #1: Manila in the Claws of Light & Monsoon Shootout

Posted on July 28, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 3 Comments

ManilaA couple of weeks ago I posted on the films I was planning to check out as part of the Melbourne International Festival. Yesterday I ticked off my first two choices, the Indian noir Monsoon Shootout and Manila in the Claws of Light.

First up, Manila in the Claws of Light (or as it is otherwise known as, The Nail of Brightness). This 1975 film is considered one of the classics of Philippines cinema. I’d heard a lot about and I wasn’t disappointed.

Julio (Bembol Rocco) is a young man who leaves his idyllic life in a small rural fishing town and travels to Manila to find his childhood sweetheart, Ligaya (Hilda Koronel), who has been trafficked into the city’s sex trade. Finding himself flat broke after he is mugged, he has no choice but to take a job working on a high-rise construction site.

The conditions are brutal, he sleeps in a wooden shack next to the half finished building, and workplace deaths are common. He also has to deal with the foreman, who regularly rips the workers off for a portion of their wages and sacks anyone who complains.

He eventually loses that job and ends up homeless on Manila’s streets, where he skirmishes with criminal gangs and meets a male prostitute who tries to induct him into the world of sex work.… Read more

→ 3 Comments

Posted in Asian noir, Crime fiction and film from India, Crime fiction and film from the Philippines, Crime film, Melbourne International Film Festival, Neo Noir

Tagged , , , , , ,

Book review: I Hear the Sirens in the Streets

Posted on May 26, 2013 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

i-hear-the-sirens-in-the-streetFor a writer who once decried the notion of book series as a tired formula, Adrian McKinty is remarkably good at them. I Hear the Sirens in the Street is the second in a series of three books set during the height of Ireland’s civil war in the seventies and eighties and featuring Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy.

Just to recap, Duffy is a Catholic in a Protestant dominated police force in a Protestant dominated town. He’s intelligent, has a nose for trouble and a determination not to back down in the face of threats from higher up in the police, or anywhere else for that matter. He also has good taste in music and, as the book opens, a deteriorating love life. In other words, he’s a well-rounded character in a hellish situation.

I Hear the Sirens in the Street kicks off the discovery of a body in a suitcase in an abandoned factory. Well, not exactly a body, the torso with the other bits sawn off. It belonged to an American citizen, a former US Marine during WWII. The American was poisoned with a very rare flower, frozen, and then cut up. Looking into the murder, it’s not long before Duffy is rubbing up against bent paramilitaries, an ambitious American carmaker and officials higher up in the police who just want to forget the whole thing.… Read more

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Adrian McKinty, Book Reviews, Neo Noir

Tagged , , ,

Night Moves

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 5 Comments

One of the things I like best about the Christmas/New Year period is it’s a good chance to catch up on my movie viewing. This holiday season I re-watched the neo-noir, Night Moves. Made in 1973, but not released until 1975, Night Moves belongs to a period of US film making that is probably my favourite. It’s a complex, meandering and multi-layered film that perfectly captures the moral and political ambiguity of the time. I wanted to review Night Moves for this site but discovered a recent post on the same topic that does it much better than I ever could by a friend called Dean Brandum.

Dean’s the man behind a terrific web site called Technicolor Yawn (for overseas readers that’s Australian slang for throwing up), which chronicles the history of Melbourne’s now vanished grindhouse cinema scene in the seventies and early eighties. He’s a great guy and what he doesn’t know about cinema is not worth knowing. The following review appeared on his site in mid-December. Enjoy.

BTW, I’ll be interviewing Dean about Melbourne’s forgotten grindhouse cinema scene on Pulp Curry sometime in the next few weeks.

“I remember Bobby (Kennedy) when he got shot, the newsreels made it look like everything was happening under water” – Paula (Jennifer Warren) in Night Moves 

It’s that certain visual aesthetic; let’s call it “muted Cannon with a chance of showers” that veneers so many Los Angeles set film noir of the early 1970s, differentiating it from the monochrome 40s-50s and the swimming pool enhanced glare of the 1960s.… Read more

→ 5 Comments

Posted in 1970s American crime films, Crime film, Gene Hackman, Neo Noir

Tagged , , , , , , , ,