KindleReviews

With Fury in Hand by Lee Thompson

By
Lee Thompson likes to place his noir stories in a family setting. In his debut crime novel, A Beautiful Madness, the author explored a family’s attempts to understand an uncharacteristic moment of violence perpetrated by their patriarch, a previously stable and upstanding man. It’s a…
Read more
iBookKindleReviews

Disintegration by Richard Thomas

By
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’…
Read more
KindleReviews

Rumrunners by Eric Better

By
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…
Read more
PrintReviews

Mañana by William Hjortsberg

By
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…
Read more
Features

The books of Tarantino

By
“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…
Read more
Features

A classic revisited: Heed the Thunder

By
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…
Read more