Who’s in control of your life? You? Or someone or something else? It’s a heady question, asked about as long as humans have thought about anything, and it’s at the heart of crime fiction, especially noir. Much of crime fiction is predicated on inevitability (chances are the detective is going to solve the case, order…
I wouldn’t say there’s been a dearth of good crime films lately; we haven’t had a renaissance, but we have gotten some good ones. It’s not a genre that is considered a genre—crime can fit into horror (Don’t Breathe), it can be a thriller (Gone Girl), or it can be a…
In the last of these columns I wrote about an author whose work I said would have to be represented in any of list of the great heist novels of all time. This time I’m covering another scribe who demands a place on that list. But John Trinian’s 1961 story Scratch a Thief (later re-titled…
Yesterday in Part I we looked at Robert Mitchum’s film career from the 1940s to the 1960s. The 1960s were a terrible time for the movie business. The golden era had come to an end. The studio system had been destroyed, and television was ascendant. The great moguls and stars who had created Hollywood and…
So many people have been cited as influences on the films of Quentin Tarantino that it’s laughable. I might as well say my 21-month-old daughter influenced Reservoir Dogs. But if there’s one crime fiction writer who could rightly make the claim (were he still living), that would be George V. Higgins. Think about the famous…
