To read Donald E. Westlake at the top of his game is to attend a master class in fun, fast-paced pulp. In Double Feature, the latest Westlake release from Hard Case Crime, we get two chances of seeing Westlake in action. While one the narratives is superior to the other, both showcase the wit, knack…
Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980, edited by Iain McIntyre and Andrew Nette, is the first comprehensive account of how the rise of postwar youth culture was depicted in mass-market pulp fiction—a must-read for anyone interested in pulp fiction, lost literary history, retro and subcultural…
Read Rob Hart's exclusive guest post about the changing landscapes of pulp fiction, and then make sure to sign in and comment below for a chance to win a copy of his latest book, The Woman from Prague! If you want to know how pulp fiction has changed in the past few decades, I think…
THE SUBGENRE: Comic book noir. THE HERO: Hardnosed detective Dick Tracy. THE VILLAIN: Crime boss Alphonse “Big Boy” Caprice. THE LOVE INTEREST(S): Loyal “Girl Friday” Tess Trueheart and gangster's moll Breathless Mahoney. THE SETTING: A 1920's metropolis. Pulp fiction gets a bad name in my opinion—no, not the Quentin Tarantino flick where Travolta jams a…
Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil is one of the great pieces of cinematic trash. It’s a frantic film, wildly over the top, in love with its own squalor, infatuated with the feel and smell of decay. Among the director’s attempts at pulp, it is his masterpiece. At its center is Welles himself, joyously grotesque in…
Thieves Fall Out by Gore Vidal (writing as Cameron Kay) is a pulp novel, rediscovered after sixty years, about a broke American in post-WWII Cairo who gets involved in smuggling, intrigue, and revolution (available April 21, 2015). This novel comes with comparisons to Casablanca right on the back—oh, it's understandable if you didn't notice that…
In case you’re confused by the author credit in the heading here, let me just say that I join you in your befuddlement. This 1961 noir novel was originally published as a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback original, with W. Franklin Sanders tagged as the writer. But over time it came to be revealed that Charles…
In the last of these columns, I compared (after saying I wouldn’t) an excellent work of noir fiction with a film that was made from its story. This time around I’m covering a book that simply reminds me of a favorite film. There are significant differences between the 1974 movie The Parallax View and Adam…
The book vs. the movie. Always interesting to compare the relative merits of a film to the written text its story is based upon. For me as for many, the book usually wins this battle. I can think of some examples of the opposite being true in my opinion, though. One striking example is The…
A hardboiled novel about a hardboiled novelist. A main character who is a hard man, who has the last name Hardman. Might as well just get straight to the point, huh? Get to the point David Karp did with this no-frills novel from 1953. Originally published by Lion Books (who, in their short run over…
