Noir/Hardboiled
Shane’s Lot: How a 1949 Gun-Toting Loner Still Rides Through American Literature
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A stranger comes to town. He is stern, quiet, with a whiff of criminality, seductive to women and men alike, his life like an arrow shooting him onward. He meets a family, he befriends a boy, he almost falls for another man’s wife, and then he saves them all in a burst of gunfire. Rider…
Chris McGinley on Appalachian Literature and Noir
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The beauty of being asked to interview Chris McGinley about his new book Once These Hills was I knew I was going to read it anyway and knew I was going to read it as soon as it hit my hands. Chris is a writer of very specific passions—classic Appalachian literature and crime fiction—and he…
Was ‘The Leopard Man’ Hollywood’s First Slasher Film?
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Cornell Woolrich published Black Alibi in 1942. His tenth book overall, it was the third in his series of “Black” novels. The Bride Wore Black (1940), later adapted into a film by Francois Truffaut, led the sequence off, succeeded by The Black Curtain (1941), The Black Angel (1943), The Black Path of Fear (1944), and…
The Queen of Grit Lit has a New Novel
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What I told her was this: “Read Once Upon a River.” Let me explain. I was at an event promoting my own new novel, Once These Hills, when a woman approached me and asked me where I got the idea to write about my main character, a fierce mountain girl, good with a bow and…
Alexis Soloski on Theater, Criticism, and the Mystery of Performance
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Vivian Parry, the main character of Alexis Soloski’s Here in the Dark, is a perceptive theater critic for a New York magazine. She’s tough on hammy actors, but even harder on herself. Despondent since her mother’s sudden death, Vivian is a self-proclaimed “abyss where a woman should be,” one who dulls “any genuine feeling with…
The Discovery of ‘Wind Sprints,’ the Lost Ralph Dennis Novel
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Nearly a decade ago, I fell in love with the twelve, out-of-print, Hardman crime novels by the late Ralph Dennis… an obsession that led me to acquire the copyright to his work, published and unpublished, and to co-found Brash Books, a publishing company to get his novels back into print. His Hardman series, with numbered…
Remembering Tim Dorsey and His Wild Florida Stories
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I am sad to report that we lost author Tim Dorsey at the end of November. He died at his home in Islamorada in the Florida Keys at age 62 – far too young, if you ask me. Tim, a bear-sized guy who frequently wore colorful tropical shirts, was the rare writer who was as…
Memory, Place, and Hauntings: On Toronto’s Seedy Seventies-Era “Sin Strip”
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In the late 70s my family emigrated to Toronto and stayed for two years. In those days, downtown was notorious for its Sin Strip. Four blocks concentrated on Yonge between Gerrard and Dundas. They were loaded with strip joints, adult bookstores, rub ‘n’ tugs and movie theatres which, according to The Globe and Mail, made…
Troubled Teens in Crime Fiction
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Teenagers don’t have it easy. On top of navigating a microculture rife with veiled rules and unspoken expectations—also known as high school—they often get a bad rap. Adults tend to view them through the lens of popular culture, assigning labels born of books and screen: rebel, cheerleader, nerd. But while they may well cycle through…