Ah, to be a mystery fan in the 1930s… Pulp fiction was rife with the jaded private eye. Magazines like Black Mask brimmed with femme fatales. Cigarette smoke filled rooms dimly lit and latticed by half-opened blinds. Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe and Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade stalked the crime-ridden alleys in search of answers, the…
Patrick Modiano’s Missing Person focuses on a private detective, introduced as Guy Roland, who investigates himself. The location is Paris; the time period, the mid-1960s. I say “introduced as Guy Roland,” because from page one of this novel, we comprehend that we are dealing with a detective narrator with little sense of his own identity. “I am nothing,” is…
Road trip – had to be a winner, right? As a kid growing up in the narrow streets of northern England, I knew America as surely as I knew the grey concrete of my own back yard. For years, I had a recurring dream; I was driving along a winding coast road – steep rocky…
Fast Shuffle by David Black is a hard-boiled noir about a used-car salesman who believes he's a private detective straight from the pages of Raymond Chandler (available July 7, 2015). Fast Shuffle is the story of private detective Harry Dickinson, a hard-boiled, tough-as-nails detective with a love of old jazz standards and finding the solutions…
Vixen by Bill Pronzini is the newest addition to the Nameless Detective series where a femme fatale spells more than trouble for the semi-retired P.I. (available June 23, 2015). The Nameless Detective is semi-retired which, as Vixen opens, suits him just fine. As a pulp fiction enthusiast, he prefers spending his days reading and cataloging…
The opening of Robert Benton’s private eye film The Late Show is chock-full of deception. We first see the Warner Brothers logo, but it’s not the Warner logo of 1977, the year the film was released. It’s a sepia colored 1940’s era Warner logo, and right away we hear soft 40’s style piano music playing…
It’s 1968, the height of the Cold War, and we are in Mexico City. Filiberto Garcia is a sixty year old Mexican policeman. Over the course of his life he has killed people: men, women, a priest. As a young man, he fought in the Mexican Revolution, serving under Pancho Villa, his killing backed by…
From the early 1970s until 1992’s Unforgiven, Westerns had become outmoded, pitiful television productions and lame B-films that had run the genre into the dust heap, and unless Clint Eastwood was starring in the saddle, no Western was getting noticed. I was still unabashedly hooked, even with the worst of the lot, and championed the…
The golden age of the fictional villain—twirling his moustache, laughing Frenchly, tying women to train tracks—was the 19th century. In that innocent age, you could actually spook readers with a one-dimensional madman; you didn’t have to bother much with a motivation (unless it was money). But then the modern era came along and started producing…
Ernest Hemingway is one of the biggest names of 20th century literature. He won the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, and his star seems in no danger of burning out even with tastes shifting away from the controversial sport of his beloved bull fighting and his outdated machismo. Though he didn’t write…
