Recently, I’ve noticed a genre label being used, and I don’t understand what it means. I’m hoping CE readers can help define this slippery term: “literary thriller.” It’s in use by authors, agents, marketing departments, reviewers, bloggers, tweeters and a host of others. However, its usage is also inconsistent, confusing, and mystifying. I think it’s…
Normally, one doesn’t think of dancing when one thinks of crime films. Sure there’s the occasional Broadway adaptation like Chicago or Guys and Dolls, but most filmmakers don’t interrupt the heist to show some hoofing. Yet there is a time-honored tradition of singing in crime films. All the way from Marlene Dietrich in The Blue…
Since we’re wrapping up X-tober I wanted to take a look back at Twin Peaks, one of the biggest influences on The X-Files. The similarities between Twin Peaks and The X-Files are easy to spot. Both shows featured a stoic and eccentric FBI agent trying to uncover mysteries that most people can’t and don’t want…
David Goodis was going to be the next Raymond Chandler. In 1946, Goodis’s second book, Dark Passage, was a bestseller and adapted into a classic film noir. Goodis was signed to a studio contract and started making more money than he ever had before. But Goodis never fit into the Hollywood lifestyle. By 1950, he’d…
Michael Caine occupies a unique position in film history. He’s one of the most important British film actors ever, but he’s always been a bigger a star in Britain then in the United States. For example, The Italian Job (1969) is a hugely popular film in Britain, but was a relative failure over here. Too…
Yesterday I looked at Jim Thompson’s time in Hollywood—a time filled mostly with frustration and creative blocks. Even the bright spots in Thompson’s film career, working with Stanley Kubrick on Paths of Glory and The Killing, were marked by struggles. Today I’m going to move past the biographical details and look at the successes and…
Crime fiction and crime films are helplessly entwined, and after a certain point it’s impossible to tell which influenced the other more. Sure you can’t talk about the creation of film noir without acknowledging Dashiell Hammett, or James Cain and the other tough-guy writers of the 1920s and 1930s. But at the same time you…
Horace McCoy led a life so interesting it seems almost comic. He was a fighter pilot in WW1 (shot down and awarded the French equivalent of the Medal of Honor, of course). He was reputedly a pretty good actor and helped create a theater in Dallas. He wrote war and adventure tales as well as…
I’m not a poker guy. Let’s just get that out in the open right away. It’s not that I dislike the game. I enjoy playing it and I’ll admit to getting sucked into the World Series of Poker (WSOP) when it’s on at a friend’s house or a bar—those hole-card cameras and odds-of-winning graphics are…
