In a Lonely Place

Posted on July 1, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 7 Comments

In a Lonely placeOne of my favourite classic film noirs, without doubt, is Nicholas Ray’s 1950 masterpiece In A Lonely Place.

It’s a taunt, claustrophobic film that works on a very emotional level for me, much more so than most classic noirs I can think of, a devastating story about the artistic process of writing and one of the few period noirs that casts a critical eye on male violence. No matter how many times I’ve seen it, I always end up with a knot in my stomach from on-screen tension.

Dix Steele (Humphrey Bogart) is a cynical screenwriter on the verge of being washed up. He also has a very violent streak to his personality that’s obviously got him into trouble many times. His agent gives him a chance for a comeback, a gig adapting a novel into a screenplay for a director well known for his popular mainstream fare. Exactly the type of film Dix hates.

His self-sabotaging distain for the job is evident when he discovers the hatcheck girl at the nightclub he’s spent the evening in has read the book he’s been asked to adapt. He invites her back to his apartment for her take about the tome. His worst suspicions about the job confirmed, he sends the girls on her way with taxi fare and goes to bed.… Read more

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Posted in Book Reviews, Crime film, Film Noir, Gloria Grahame, Humphrey Bogart, Noir fiction

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Pulp Friday: The Last Refuge

Posted on June 28, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

The Last RefugeToday’s Pulp Friday is a little known but interesting book, The Last Refuge by Edward Lindall, published in 1972.

It’s interesting for two reasons.

First, it was an attempt to set a spy thriller amid the radical student politics taking place in Australia in the early seventies.

The second reason is the publisher, a little known Melbourne-based pulp publishing outfit called Gold Star Publications.

The main character of The Last Refuge is Jay Landon, an Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation agent, assigned the mission of infiltrating and destabalising a group of Maoists, led by Peking agent, Clyde Mansell. The Maoists have left their inner city terraces for the wide expanse of the Australia’s north to wage guerrilla war against US multinationals stripping the country of its mineral wealth.

Lindall’s real name was Ernest Edward Smith, an Adelaide based journalist and writer who penned 13 books, mainly crime and thrillers, but also some science fiction. He died in 1979. The Last Refuge, the only of his books released by Gold Star Publications, taps into the very real politics of what was the most physically and politically aggressive of the radical student groups operating on Australian campuses in the early seventies.

Here’s the back cover blurb:

“There’s always two sides to any story.… Read more

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Posted in Australian pulp fiction, Gold Star Publications, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Spies, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Marking time in the City of Angels

Posted on June 25, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 3 Comments

Check InnI always find revisiting a city I’ve lived in after a long time away a bittersweet experience.

In the mid-nineties I spent nearly six years in South East Asia, with my partner Angela Savage, mainly working as a journalist. This included a year living in Bangkok, the abbreviated Thai name for which, Krung Thep, literally means “City of Angels”.

I also made countless trips to the city to transit to other places, for visa runs and R & R breaks. There was the time I got thrown out of Vietnam for something I’d written and had to cool my heels there for several weeks.  When my partner and I used to live in the Lao capital Vientiane we used to fly down specifically to buy English language fiction books.

Not that I ever needed much of a reason for a visit.

I loathed the Bangkok when I first visited it 1992, the pollution, the traffic and sheer, daunting bloody scale of the place. But when I left the region at the beginning of 1997, it was my favourite place. I loved the food, the people and the energy. I still like all these things, particularly the energy. New York? Bangkok’s the place that never sleeps unless it’s to grab a quick snooze on the back of a truck in slow moving traffic.… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction and film from Thailand

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Hell Drivers

Posted on May 27, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

Hell Drivers poster01When we think classic noir cinema, we usually think of America. But in the forties, fifties and sixties, Britain produced its share of great noirs.

The British noirs I’ve seen are dark, brutal affairs, perhaps even more uncompromising than their American counterparts because of their depiction of the UK’s all pervasive and claustrophobic class system. Films like Brighton Rock (1949), The Third Man (1949), Basil Dreaden’s heist film, The League of Gentlemen and John Guillermin’s Never Let Go (which both came out in 1960) and the terrific Joseph Losey movie starring Dirk Bogarde, The Servant (1963).

But without doubt one of the best and toughest of the crop of post-war British noirs was Cy Endfield’s 1957 film, Hell Drivers. From the very beginning, the view from the cabin of a truck being driven at dangerously high speed, The Hell Drivers brims with pent up fury.

The plot of Hell Drivers is fairly simple. Tom (Stanley Baker) plays a young working class man fresh out of jail following a botched heist that crippled his brother (David McCallum) and left him with a huge burden of guilt. He takes a job at Hawlett Trucking Company. The work involves him driving a ten tonne truck to a gravel pit, loading gravel, and transporting it to a new construction site, as quickly and as many times a day as they can.… Read more

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Posted in British crime cinema, Crime film, Joseph Losey, Richard Burton, Stanley Baker

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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

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Posted in Adrian McKinty, Book Reviews, Neo Noir

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