I’ve been watching Justified set its chess pieces on the board for most of season 3; finally, in this week’s episode, we got to see the brilliant middle game that’s playing out between Robert Quarles, Boyd Crowder, Ellstin Limehouse and Raylan Givens. In fact, “Watching the Detectives” was so good that I had to exercise…
Madeline Kimbell is a damsel in distress; Virgil Tucker is a lawman with a strong sense of justice and a network of friends on both sides of the law who can help to keep her safe. Milton T. Burton’s The Devil’s Odds has all the ingredients a good Southern noir should have: strong, dark men,…
Driving up US 163, one watches the landscape gradually flatten and turn sandstone red. The Navajo Nation—the largest Native American reservation in America, occupying good-sized chunks of northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico, as well as a sliver of southeastern Utah—is a land of austere beauty. Rock and dirt and sky stretch, like a bone-dry…
[NOTE: You know by now we’ll be spinnin’ SPOILERS, don’t you?] This week’s episode of Justified focused primarily on the criminals, who can be divided into three groups: the smart, the focused and the terrifying masterminds (Quarles, the nattily dressed Detroit baddy; Boyd Crowder; and Limehouse), the middle-managers (Wynn Duffy and Glen Fogle), and the…
Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry’s 1985 epic of the old west, was the kind of success that can ruin a writer. Before its release, McMurtry was the widely respected author of “literary” novels like Moving On and All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers. Despite being pegged as a regional writer, the native Texan was…
High Noon holds a curious place in the pantheon of Westerns. While it’s an acknowledged classic regarded by many people as one of the best examples of the genre, it is also a disputed film in many ways. In some quarters, it has been viewed with suspicion since its release in 1952. As the film…
Before I begin talking about the season premiere of Justified, I’d like to raise a virtual toast (with clean glasses) to Mags Bennett, who gave new meaning to the phrase “as American as apple pie.” I can only hope that season 3’s villains, whoever they may be, can compete with her unique combination of motherly…
Justified season 3 is set to return on Tuesday, January 17, 2012. And it looks like they are going to start the new year off right, with Boyd and Raylan getting into a fist fight in the middle of a U.S. Marshall Office. I know I’m going to watch it, what about you?
We’ve been fans of Luis Alberto Urrea’s since before he allowed us to launch this site with his excellent contemporary crime story “The National City Reparation Society” from Akashic Books’ anthology San Diego Noir. If you’ve only read that, you may not know about his historic novels about Teresita Urrea, a distant relative of his.…
The Continental Congress declared the first National Thanksgiving in 1777, but the Harpe brothers weren’t thankful for anything except another day to thieve and kill. Recently, I encountered the story of the pair who are, perhaps, America’s first serial killers, though they exhibited some horrifying characteristics of spree killers, too. What makes it trickier for…
