iBookKindleReviews

Disintegration by Richard Thomas

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Anyone familiar with Thomas’s neo-noir anthology The New Black will know the author is a fan of the dark stuff. So you won’t be surprised to learn that Disintegration, subtitled A Windy City Dark Mystery, is pitch black in tone. The un-named protagonist of Thomas’…
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KindleReviews

Rumrunners by Eric Better

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Eric Beetner might just be noir’s James Brown. The hardest working man in crime fiction not only curates the LA chapter of the Noir at the Bar reading series, but produces a prodigious amount of short fiction for the likes of Crime Factory, Thuglit, and…
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PrintReviews

Mañana by William Hjortsberg

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Sometime between the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis and the murder of Meredith Hunter by Hells Angels at the Altamont Free Concert in 1969, the hippy dream died. Free love, civil rights, and gender equality all took a beating and the naïve…
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Features

The books of Tarantino

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“When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, ‘No, I went to films’,” said Quentin Tarantino. The director has an encyclopaedic knowledge of film and pop-culture thanks to his days working at the video rental store Video Archives in California, but…
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Features

A classic revisited: Heed the Thunder

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Jim Thompson’s second novel Heed the Thunder is a sprawling, multi-generational epic following the descent of the Fargo clan at the turn of the 19th century. Although not a noir in the strictest sense, its ominous style and cruel but sympathetic characters show clear signs…
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Book Club

Fatale

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No-one does contempt for the bourgeoisie quite like the French, and Jean-Patrick Manchette was as hard left as they come. Before succumbing to cancer in 1995 he had re-invented the French noir novel with his own unique brand of hardboiled. In this re-issue of Fatale…
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Book Club

Love You to a Pulp

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Brownsville is in the state of Somewhere, USA. It’s home to the cynical, solvent sniffing detective Neil Chambers. When Jenkins, the local pharmacist, turns to Chambers for help after being beaten up by his daughter’s boyfriend, our downbeat hero agrees to look for Hoon and…
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