Tag Archives: William Lindsay Gresham

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

The grifters and con artists of Nightmare Alley

I have a piece on the new Crime Reads site – a spin off of the respected Literary Hub- on William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 little known novel, Nightmare Alley. Gresham’s book is a masterful story about the art of the grift and the best fictional depiction of the carny (slang for the traveling carnival employee). But most of all, it is a stone cold classic piece of low life noir fiction, dark, visceral, surprisingly sex-drenched for its time, and utterly devoid of redemption.

The piece is available in full here on Crime Reads.Read more