There was a time when I would have easily named John Carpenter as my favorite movie director. I’ve gained more pure visceral pleasure from his movies than almost anyone else7rsquo;s. He perfectly bridges the gap between classic Hollywood story sense and modern uncensored pleasures. Even as a teenager I got the sense Carpenter didn’t play by the old rules. He made movies that were FUN.

Was he the most technically proficient? Maybe not. Does it matter? Not a damn bit. He came out of the era that birthed film school darlings like Scorsese, Spielberg, DePalma, and Landis. Darlings of the film students, that is, not necessarily the professors who might not always like the down-in-the-marrow joys of such schlock as Jaws, Taxi Driver, Blow Out, or The Blues Brothers. But even more than those other directors, Carpenter embodied the then-popular auteur concept by writing, producing, directing and even scoring his early films. Despite this, he is rarely—until now—mentioned artistically among his peers of the era.

Carpenter’s early career was a brilliantly sustained period of pulp cinema to rival anyone since Anthony Mann made his string of film noirs. His breakout hit was Halloween, and the film that unfairly tagged him a horror director for the rest of his career. As perfect as a horror film gets, Halloween was, again, a bridge from the relatively tame scare films pre-Halloween to the post-Halloween rise of the slasher film, despite Carpenter’s tale not having all that much blood in it. (And of course buckets of blood had been spilled in the grindhouse for years, but Halloween also had the distinction of being a major hit.)

[We haven’t looked at the closet the same way since...]

The cinematic car chase has become a whipping boy for all that is mindless and vapid in movies today. It’s a damn shame, because while a rudimentary car chase is like eating an empty calorie meal at McDonald’s, a great car chase can contain some of the finest examples of pure cinema.

Let’s start with the undisputed champs.

The 1970s were the golden age of the car chase. These were sequences with real cars, real drivers in dangerous situations on real city streets. Nowadays car chases may be significantly more elaborate, but you rarely see a chase that doesn’t use CGI cars, embellished explosions, cars on wires or gimbels or other Hollywood special effects that do keep stunt drivers safer, but take a bit of the rubber-on-the-road realism out of the car chases.

[Put the pedal to the metal!]

From the promise of discovering a dusty Van Gogh in the attic, to coming across fabled recordings by Robert Johnson, we love to discover something once thought lost forever.

For book lovers the big game is the mythical lost manuscript that may or may not even exist. Now, with the publication of James M. Cain’s The Cocktail Waitress we have a genuine rediscovery to marvel at. No one is claiming the novel to be on the level of Cain’s best-known works, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, and Double Indemnity, but Cain wrote plenty of subpar novels in their wake.

The Cocktail Waitress is made remarkable by the fact that, despite rumors, scholars were starting to doubt if it even existed at all. Only through the intrepid hunting of Hard Case Crime honcho Charles Ardai who went on an Indiana-Jones-worthy quest to uncover the lost book, can we enjoy another dose of Cain. And the find stokes the fire to discover the next long-forgotten work.

[The treasures of the book world...]

Shining a light on underrated crime films. The coulda beens and shoulda beens you ought to know about.

Tonight’s Screening: Running Scared (1986)

This one will be a little different because I’m not going to pretend for a minute this is a great movie. But aren’t some of your favorite movies of all time really only the B-minus movies? The contenders who win you over with charm and effort? 

Running Scared is a child of Beverly Hills Cop and 48 Hours. After that smash hit combo, the buddy cop film with a dash of humor was all the rage. Casting comedians as cops didn’t seem like a bad choice. And voilá –Billy Crystal as a tough homicide cop on the mean streets of Chicago. 

[Wait, are you serious?]

The Revival House: Shining a light on underrated crime films. The coulda beens and shoulda beens you ought to know about.

Tonight’s Screening: Atlantic City (1981)

Why is it so often foreigners have a more astute vision of America than Americans do? When French director Louis Malle took on the decaying also-ran gambling world of Atlantic City, he created a portrait of America in decline, in love with a romanticized vision of its past, and a population with a yearning to escape to better worlds. And yes, I mean that Louis Malle, the man best know for a film involving two people doing nothing more than sitting and talking at dinner for two hours. My Dinner With Andre came out the same year as Atlantic City and it baffles me why one and not the other has remained in the public consciousness.

With the screenplay help of New York playwright John Guare, Atlantic City is a revisionist crime film much like the westerns to come out of the 1970s like The Shootist or High Plains Drifter. It was revising a genre that didn’t know it needed a revision. 

[Isn’t that how it usually goes?]

A City of Broken Glass by Rebecca Cantrell is the fourth in the Hannah Vogel historical mystery series set at the beginning of World War II (available July 17, 2012).

If this looks good to you, don’t forget to enter to win the full set of Hannah Vogel books!

By the time of A City of Broken Glass, the Nazis have spread their fear and hatred throughout Germany and have infected neighboring countries like Poland, where we find Hannah in the beginning of another tense novel fraught with danger.

[But Hannah never shrinks from danger . . .]

The Revival House: Shining a light on underrated crime films.
The coulda beens and shoulda beens you ought to know about.

Tonight’s Screening: Flesh and Bone (1993)

Flesh and Bone plays out like a slow Texas drawl. It’s a dusty noir done languid and mean. Most would say, beyond the unhurried pace, miscasting did the film in. I’d argue it was only the audience’s predispositions that did the most damage.

Dennis Quaid plays stoic like he was born to it. We all know James Caan can do mean and ornery. Gwyneth Paltrow wasn’t yet Gwyneth so her performance comes with no baggage (and is great, by the way. She plays a nasty grifter like she means it.)

No, it was Meg Ryan who turned most people away from Flesh and Bone. 1993 was the same year as Sleepless in Seattle and only a few years removed from When Harry Met Sally. America had its sweetheart and it didn’t like her shooting guns or popping out of a stripper cake.

[That doesn’t sound like America’s Sweetheart to me!]

As I sit in my home office and type this, I am surrounded by the things that I love. On every wall, over my desk, behind me, even behind the door, are movie posters. Not just any movie posters—vintage Film Noir movie posters. Yes, I am a collector.

I’ve collected movie posters since high school when I worked in a video store and took home anything and everything Horror. It is not hyperbole to say, in high school, every inch of the wall and ceiling space in my room was covered with posters. My Dad thought I was a disturbed young man.

As I aged and my tastes in films refined some, I began collecting Film Noir posters. Part of the appeal, as any collector will tell you, is that they aren’t readily available. Finding a poster for something modern like The Matrix or Pirates of the Caribbean is easy (and mercifully cheap). Vintage poster collecting involves the hunt, the slow morphine drip of any true collector. The drug that keeps us coming back for more.

[The high of finding just what you want . . .]

The Revival House: Shining a light on underrated crime films. The coulda beens and shoulda beens you ought to know about.

Tonight’s Screening: Twilight (1998)

Poor Twilight. Never a big hit when it was released, and thus proving to Hollywood accountants that movies starring people over 50 will never do well, it has since been relegated to forever being confused for that other Twilight movie and feeling the anger of every tween girl who got confused when accidentally adding the Paul Newman-starring film to their Netflix queue. 

Twilight plays as a sort of spiritual cousin to Newman’s Harper from the 1960s. It is a swan song, in a way, to a classic style of mystery. A little slower, less sex and car chases. Newman gets to play a retired cop and investigator who is friends with Gene Hackman as an aging, cancer-stricken movie star. Susan Sarandon is Hackman’s trophy wife, starting to feel her age as well. And let’s not forget James Garner as a pal of Newman’s. Not exactly a cast for the teen set.

[I don’t know about you, but I’ll take Paul Newman any day!]

The Revival House: Shining a light on underrated crime films. The coulda beens and shoulda beens you ought to know about.

Tonight’s Screening: State of Grace (1990)

There is so much to love about State of Grace, and almost all those things are what made it a flop at the box office. It didn’t even crack the 2 million mark. Granted those were 1990 dollars, but even back then under 2 mil put it at #156 for the year. Right in the neighborhood of flop city.

The trials and travails of the Irish mob in New York is rich, untapped territory and State of Grace takes us deep inside a crime organization undergoing growing pains and struggling to prove itself with the big dogs on the street—the Italians. The first and only produced screenplay by Dennis McIntyre (who I will assume is Irish) is a twisty and tense thriller that plays out slowly and draws you in like quicksand.

[Quicksand never felt so good . . .]

The readers have spoken. After a list that started with eight of the worst offenders in the world of crime cliches, we have our winner. Or our loser, depending on how you look at it.

To recap: We started off pitting hit men against serial killers, the idea of riding the coattails of Sherlock Holmes against the fabled and fated “one last job”, put the alcoholic P.I. up against the old school Italian mafia and let the paranormal crime solvers duke it out with the culinary sleuths.

The voting was at times razor thin, and other times wide open as a slashed throat. But we’ve come down to it and the one worn-out trope you, the readers, would like to see done away with is—

[Dum-dum-dum...]

At long last, we have reached the finals. After some very tight races and some runaway landslides, we have the two most hated plot devices in crime fiction. Now it’s time to vote for the one you most want to see go away. Then we write an open letter to authors and ask them politely to put an end to the cliché.

So who’s it gonna be?

In our last round we had a nail biter and a crushing defeat. In the category of main characters, Serial Killers vs. Old School Mafia types went down to the wire. From the start, The Mob found very few friends around here, but at the eleventh hour those pesky Serial Killers slashed their way into the victory circle. Seems a slim margin of readers are more tired of spree killers than of pinstripe suits and severed horse heads.

In the category of plot devices the answer was clear. Feel free to write about Sherlock Holmes all you want (yay, that means we don’t have to tell Steve Hockensmith to stop writing his fantastic Holmes on the Range series!) but whatever you do, don’t set out to write yet another chef-based mystery. Readers are getting heartburn over the culinary-themed murder tales. If you include a recipe in the back of the book, that only makes things worse.

But that’s only someone else’s opinion! It’s time to let yours be heard. There are surely many defenders of the culinary murder mystery. Time to put your vote where your mouth is.

The final showdown is set: Serial Killers vs. Culinary Mysteries.

So, which cliché gets sent to that big kitchen in the sky?

Is it time to do away with the indiscriminate killers and maybe the cops/FBI agents/investigator with a dark past who hunt them?

Or is it time to close down the kitchen, cork the wine, put away the cheese and get back to some old fashioned bullets and broads crime stories?

Cast your vote for who has to go below and we’ll announce the...er...“winner” next week.

Eric Beetner is the author of Dig Two Graves, Split Decision (Book #3 in the Fight Card series) and co-author with JB Kohl of One Too Many Blows To The Head and Borrowed Trouble. His award-winning short fiction has appeared in Pulp Ink, D*cked, Off The Record, Grimm Tales, Discount Noir, Needle, Murder In The Wind and the upcoming Million Writers Award: best new online voices. For more and links to free stories visit ericbeetner.blogspot.com

Read all Eric Beetner’s posts for Criminal Element.

Considering the worst cliches in crime, the votes have been tallied and it’s final four time. A lot of passionate responses and a mix of tight races and lopsided contests.

Let’s recap from the first round: As protagonists, Hit Men and Serial Killers were (broken) neck and neck, but in the final votes, Serial Killers led the way as the more hated trope. The hit men survive and live to kill another day.

[It’s a good day to die...]

It’s March and that means madness. And one thing that makes me mad is tired old tropes in the mystery genre. You know the ones: flat, cardboard characters and recycled plots that have worn out their welcome, or at least need to go on an extended vacation.

Now is your chance to make your voice heard. Below you’ll see the top eight worst offenders in the overused crime cliché category. Time to figure out which causes the most madness among readers.

Sure, some may still work, but some may be so tired they need to be taken out back of the shed and shot. Of course, you may like some and will never tire of them. Then get in there and vote! Defend your favorites and vote to exile the ones that burn your eyeballs!

[Let the voting begin!]

Do me a favor. Close your eyes and think of Magnum P.I. It’s no stretch to say you thought of two things: a mustache and a Ferrari. 

Let’s try again. Starsky & Hutch. Let me guess—a collared sweater and a red Gran Torino with a pre-Nike swoosh on it.

One more for luck. Knight Rider. You pictured David Hasselhoff rolling on the floor eating a cheeseburger while drunk and a talking car.

So where have all the cool cars gone?

[Now that you mention it, where have they gone?]

Hang on to your hats, people. This is a wild one.

The main character in Chris F. Holm’s novel Dead Harvest goes by many names and lives in many bodies. His real name is Sam Thornton, but that body is old news. You see, Sam is a Collector. His purgatory of a job is to collect the souls of the damned and send them to hell. He gets all sorts of special powers, but none that make his especially happy. Sam’s soul is damned as well.

[Damned if you do, damned if you don’t...]

Admit it—you’ve thought about it. If you came across a stash of money out of the blue, a huge pile of cash dropped from nowhere into your lap, you’d be tempted to keep it, wouldn’t you?

If you answered. “Yes, I’ve thought about it,” you’d be a normal human being. If you answered, “I’d totally keep it; all my problems would be solved,” you’ve obviously never read a crime novel about finding a bag of money. Finding a wad of cash never works out well.

[But it’s a WAD of CASH! What could go wrong?]

Aside from a few times on airplanes, I don’t read books in a day. I started Hell on Church Street in the morning and before the clock rolled over to tomorrow, I was done.

I’ve admired Jake Hinkson’s writing for a while now. His short story Maker’s and Coke is one of the finest pieces of contemporary Noir I’ve read. He gets it. The pathos, the desperation, shadows that come off the page. And character. Hell on Church Street has that in spades. 

It starts with a clever framing device that allows for two different narrators and entices us in with exchanges like this one:

“So what happened?”

“The story of my life?”

“Whatever.”

He shrugged. “The story of my life is I lived, I fucked up, and I’m going to die. I’ll probably go to hell.” 

[And isn’t that just the story of all our lives?]