The latest in my series on the 4:3 site on the best film noir you’ve never of is live, Howard W Koch’s wonderful 1954 bad cop noir, Shield For Murder, starring actor Edmond O’Brien. Not a great film production wise, but as bad cop films go, it’s as dark and twisted as they come. You can read the piece in full on the 4:3 site here.
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It’s time for my annual top 10 reads for the year. In no particular order they are as follows:
Bad Penny Blues, Cathi Unsworth
Bad Penny Blues kicks off in London in the early 1960s. A young police constable finds the body of a murdered prostitute. His subsequent investigation into the crime and similar murders, spanning the better part of a decade, propels him into the heart of the city’s Soho vice district. Interspersed with this is the story of a young and up and coming fashion designer, Stella, who is plagued by nightmares about dead women.
The fact I found this book a pinch too long didn’t detract from my enjoyment of it. Bad Penny Blues is a solid piece of noir fiction and a great evocation of sixties London, taking in everything from the occult, teddy boys, bent cops, radical bohemians and debauched upper class aristocrats.
The Tattoo Murder Case, Akimitsu Takagi
First published, albeit in a slightly different form, in 1948, a young forensic medical student with post-traumatic stress after a stint as a medic in the Philippines begins a passionate affair with a beautiful woman who is covered with strange, sexually alluring traditional Japanese tattoos. Soon after the affair begins, she is murdered, dismembered and her tattooed torso stolen from the scene of the crime.… Read more
Posted in Australian noir, Book Reviews, Crime fiction, Crime fiction and film from Japan, Crime Fiction and film set in Vietnam, Robert Stone, Science fiction and fantasy
Tagged Akimitsu Takagi, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Bad Penny Blues, Candice Fox, Cathi Unsworth, Dog Soldiers, Don Carpenter, erent Vice, Hades, Hard Rain Falling, Mark Dapin, Paula Rabinowitz, R&R, Roadside Picnic, Robert Stone, The Secret Speech, The Tattoo Murder Case, Thomas Pynchon, Tim Robb Smith
The Big Nowhere is a series of columns I’ve been doing for the 4:3 site, in which I look at the best film noir you’ve never heard of. Number 4 in the series is Jerry Hopper’s 1954 B-noir, Naked Alibi. A tale of desperate men, a femme fatale, jealously, obsession, set in a seedy small town, just your average film noir cocktail. What makes this otherwise average film worth seeing is the presence of Sterling Hayden as the disgraced cop and Gloria Grahame as the singer, two of the most interesting actors who worked in film noir in the late ’40s and ’50s.
You can read the piece in full here on the 4:3 site.
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As we move with terrifying speed towards the end of 2015, I want to hit you all with a few pieces of book related news.
First up, Ghost Money, my crime novel set in nineties Cambodia is now available in hardback from the publisher, Crime Wave Press. A brand spanking new hard copy of the my novel, which is still getting good reviews, will set you back around $14 plus postage, give or take the exchange rate. I mean, really, as the Yuletide season approaches what better present could you give someone?
For those of you who may be new to this, here’s the pitch:
Cambodia, 1996, the long-running Khmer Rouge insurgency is fragmenting, competing factions of the coalition government scrambling to gain the upper hand. Missing in the chaos is businessman Charles Avery. Hired to find him is Vietnamese Australian ex-cop Max Quinlan.
But Avery has made dangerous enemies and Quinlan is not the only one looking. Teaming up with Heng Sarin, a local journalist, Quinlan’s search takes him from the freewheeling capital Phnom Penh to the battle scarred western borderlands. As the political temperature soars, he is slowly drawn into a mystery that plunges him into the heart of Cambodia’s bloody past.
Ghost Money is a crime novel about Cambodia in the mid-nineties, a broken country, what happens to those trapped between two periods of history, the choices they make, what they do to survive.… Read more
Today I’m celebrating Noirvember with a terrific guest post by my friend Dean Brandum, film scholar and the man behind the wonderful site, Technicolour Yawn: Melbourne cinemas of the happening years: 1960 – 84. Dean looks at the myths and realities around the exhibition of classical film noir in forties and fifties Melbourne. Film noir is often seen as mainly comprising B-movies that would never have graced the screens of reputable Melbourne cinemas. But, as Dean makes clear, for the most part this was not the case.
“You could always find me in the theatre round the corner. People like me liked our pictures dark and mysterious. Most were B-movies made on the cheap, others were classy models with A-talent, but they all had one thing in common, they lived on the edge. They told stories about life on the streets, shady characters, crooked cops, twisted love and bad luck. The French invented a name for these pictures – Film Noir.”
Richard Widmark narrating The American Cinema’s episode ‘Film Noir’
Whilst this TV overview of film noir was an excellent production and was immeasurably aided by the gravitas of the (then otherwise retired) voice of Richard Widmark’s narration, his opening introduction has always rankled with me, for it perpetuates a myth about film noir, one which has been developed to be shoe-horned into a narrative – that film noir was not a mainstream commodity.… Read more
Posted in Australian popular culture, Film Noir, Forgotten Melbourne, Robert Aldrich
Tagged Classic film noir in Melbourne, Dean Brandum, Gilda (1946), Gun Crazy (1950), Jules Dassin, Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Kiss of Death (1947), Liberty Theatre Bourke Stree, Night and the City (1950), Richard Widmark, The Lyceum
