Category Archives: Femme fatale

Dishing up Pulp Curry in a new way: why I am starting a Substack newsletter

After much thought I have decided that to experiment with moving the focus of my blogging from this site to a new Pulp Curry Substack newsletter.

Why am I doing this?

The first post on this website appeared on July 2010 (about the incredibly underrated 1979 Australian heist film, Money Moversyou can read the post here). I’ve been writing on the site with varying frequency ever since (579 posts in all), and for the most part have enjoyed it immensely.

But for the last 12 or so months I just haven’t been feeling it – or getting the hits to make it seem worthwhile – and have started to wonder whether it’s worth continuing with the effort. Posting on a website has been starting to feel like the equivalent of trying to read a broadsheet newspaper in a crowded tram carriage, unwieldy and inconvenient.

And, thinking about it, I suspect the blog format is starting to get a bit stale for me and is actually now a brake on my posting more regularly.

I know that I’m no Robinson Crusoe in this regard. The majority of the blogs I used to follow have gradually fallen by the wayside, as people have moved on, grown weary of the effort, found other interests, adopted other means to get their message out, or, in some cases (gulp), died.… Read more

Projection Booth podcast #595: Nightmare Alley (1947)

For your Noirvember listening pleasure, the latest episode of Projection Booth Podcast is on the 1947 film noir, Nightmare Alley. I join Projection Booth host Mike White & film critic Samm Deighan to talk about the film, the William Lindsay Gresham book it is based on, and the 2021 reboot. We also discuss carnival noir & clairvoyants in noir film & I did a particular shout out to Bryan Forbes’s Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964). We also talked a fair bit about sex: how much sex Stanton Carlisle gets in the 1947 film version (because no one else ever seems to) and how sexy that version is generally, especially compared to the 2021 reboot.

You can listen to the episode in full at this link.Read more

Register for on-line NoirCon 2022

Those of you who have been following my site for a while now may have seen me post about NoirCon previously. A celebration of all things noir in film, literature, art and anything else you care to mention, NoirCon was previously held as a face-to-face gathering in Philadelphia, but has been cancelled for the last few years, due to Covid and other problems.

Well, now it is back, this year as an online gathering.

NoirCon will take place Friday-Saturday, October 21-23, EST. Virtual NoirCon 2022 will be held on the Accelevents platform. An all-access pass covering the entire conference is $36. Registration includes access to the Accelevents platform for 30 days after the event, so attendees can re-watch events or catch up on panels they missed.

NoirCon is hands down the best literary/arts festival I have attended. The exact program is not live yet but whatever the fevered mind of NoirCon organiser Lou Boxer has dreamt up in terms of a program, I have no doubt it’ll be good, including new events and events that would have been held in previous cancelled versions of the program. So if you have any interest in noir at all and are able to make the time zone work for you, you should definitely register at this link.… Read more

Crime Factory femme fatales

I have been meaning to post for the last few days about the March 5 launch of Crime Factory Publications.

It was a good night. A decent sized crowd rocked up to Grumpy’s Green in Fitzroy to hear readings by Adrian McKinty, Leigh Redhead, David Whish Wilson and Megan Abbott. The jazz band After Dark My Sweet, were on fire. We even sold a few copies of the local edition of Crime Factory: The First Shift.

The highlight for me was meeting US noir author Megan Abbott. Not only is she a fantastic writer, she was incredibly generous with her time and thoughts about all things crime fiction and noir.

She read was from her upcoming book Dare Me. Dare Me is her most contemporary novel to date, set amongst the world of competitive cheerleading. I’d never thought about cheerleaders as akin to US servicemen or, better still, the modern American equivalent of gladiators. But talking to Megan about what inspired Dare Me, and the research she did for it, neither analogy sounds too far from the mark.

I can’t tell you how much I am dying to read it.

I won’t say anything more now. I managed to grab an hour before the launch to interview Megan for the next issue of Crime Factory.… Read more

The two faces of the femme fatale

The femme fatale is a staple character of crime fiction and film. Last weekend, I got a glimpse of the reality behind screen and literary presentations of female criminality at an exhibition into Australia’s famous female criminals, currently taking place at Geelong’s National Wool Museum.

You don’t have to have a PhD in cultural studies to realise that our fascination with women as deviants is deeply rooted in conceptions that stretch back to the Bible (Eve, anyone?), fairy and folk tales. The exhibition, Femme Fatale: The female criminal opens with a quote by Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso from 1893 that epitomises this worldview: “The born female is, so to speak, doubly exceptional, first as a women and then as a criminal. This is because criminals are an exception among civilised people and women are the exception among criminals… As a double exception, then, the criminal woman is a monster.”

The exhibition includes a pretty grim history of the illegal or backyard abortion industry, the women who often ran it and the police who profited from protecting it. This includes some amazing police crime scene photos (not for the faint hearted) of the premises in which back yard abortionists operated.

A section examines the depiction of women criminals in popular culture, including the femme fatale of classic hardboiled and noir crime fiction and film, women in prison films such as Convicted Women in 1940 (“WOMEN WEEP … but not for their sins … as tear gas quells female prison riots”), and more recent examples such as Thelma and Louise and Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.… Read more