Tag Archives: True Detective

Chiefs

Posted on July 7, 2014 by Andrew Nette| 4 Comments

CHIEFS SLEEVEI’d never heard of Chiefs, a three part 1983 US television series, until recently.

But a recommendation from Overland Magazine deputy editor Jacinda Woodhead got me interested. Her pitch, which wasn’t too far off the mark, was that it has definite similarities to the recent hit series, True Detective.

Chiefs is about three generations of police chiefs in a small southern US town called Delano, each of who tries to solve a number of murders of young white men stretching from the early twenties to the early sixties.

Will Henry Lee (Wayne Rogers, better known as Captain John McIntyre from the hit show, MASH), is the town’s founding chief. A former farmer who can no longer make a living off the land, he is a decent, progressive small ‘L’ liberal and acts in his new job accordingly. Not long after his he takes the job, the body of a young white boy is found near train tracks on the outskirts of Delano. The boy was raped and there are signs he’d been beaten with a truncheon similar to that used by police. Soon, rumours surface about the disappearances of other young white men in the town’s vicinity.

The second chief is Sonny Butts (Brad Davis from the 1978 film, Midnight Express).… Read more

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Posted in 1980s American crime films

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Book review: Galveston

Posted on April 7, 2014 by Andrew Nette| 3 Comments

GalvestonNic Pizzolatto’s first novel, Galveston, was published in 2010. Prior to that he wrote a book of short stories that appeared in 2006. It’s fair to say most people didn’t hear about Galveston until the screening in January this year of Pizzolatto’s groundbreaking television show, True Detective.

Since then I have not been able to move on social media for the number of people talking about how good Galveston is (which begs the question, is True Detective the longest book trailer ever made?).

Given my obsession with True Detective (which I reviewed for the Overland Journal site here), I was keen to read Galveston as soon as possible.

The short version of this review is that if you like True Detective, you’ll love this book. It’s as simple as that. The book and the show have a number of things in common, including the same rural southern US setting, a number of similar plot devices and the writing style.

Roy Cady is a bagman and thug for a New Orleans’ mobster called Stan Ptitko. The same day a doctor tells Cady he has terminal cancer, Ptitko orders him and another man to visit the president of the local dockworkers local, now the target of a federal criminal investigation.… Read more

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Posted in Book Reviews, Crime fiction, Noir fiction

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True Detective

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

true-detectiveLong before it was a television series, True Detective was the name of an American magazine that specialised in lurid, sensationalised stories of real-life crimes, often told from the point-of-view of the grizzled police veterans who investigated them.

This reference point is important when discussing the television incarnation of True Detective. The central thread and internal mythology of the show – two tough, damaged police detectives, hell-bent on avenging the murder of innocent women and children in the face of considerable official complacency – owes much to the true-crime magazine genre. It’s also been a standard trope in crime fiction since the 1930s.

The eight-part series (and careful, some spoilers follow) begins in Louisiana in the mid-90s. Two police detectives, Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) and his new partner Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) are assigned to investigate the murder of a young woman. Particularly shocking are the presence of strange occult symbols on the woman’s body and surrounding crime scene. All we know about the woman is that she was a drifter and a prostitute. With the exception of Marty and Rust, no-one wants to spend too much time and energy finding out what happened to her.

As the investigation proceeds, the detectives begin to link her killing to a string of apparently unrelated disappearances across the huge expanse of rural Louisiana.… Read more

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Posted in Crime film, True crime

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