Category Archives: Albert Dekker

Book review: Murder on Easy Street

Posted on May 6, 2019 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Back in 2014, I wrote a piece for the Wheeler Centre site about what I described as the ‘new wave’ of true crime works. These books differed from the earlier style of true crime work, which, with a few exceptions, were liable to be by the numbers, often quickly written books about sensational crimes – serial killers being a favourite – put together from various second hand sources, with a bit of local colour thrown into the mix.

The new wave of true crime books I was referring to, were more literary, focused on the political processes around the crime in question and, indeed, had a much broader definition of what ‘crime’ was. More often than not, they also seemed to be written by individuals that were either directly involved in the crime in question or somehow managed to shoe horn their own life experience into what they are writing about, so they become as much about the author as whatever crime they are writing about. When these kind of true crime books work, they can work big time. But they don’t always work.

If I had to classify it, I would say Helen Thomas’s Murder on Easy has more of the former type of book in it than the latter.… Read more

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Posted in Albert Dekker, Australian popular culture, True crime

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Guest post: the indirect path to writing your book

Posted on February 26, 2019 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

It gives me great pleasure to welcome New York crime writer, Richie Narvaez, to Pulp Curry. Richie a friend. He is also a hell of a good crime writer. I loved his short story collection, Roachkiller and Other Stories, and I had the pleasure of reading a very early draft of the upcoming novel he is guest posting about today, Hipster Death Rattle, which is also great stuff. I don’t want to pre-empt Richie’s post, but Deathrattle is unique crime fiction take on the gentrification that have been sweeping New York. It drops from Down and Out Books in early March and you can pre-order it here.

You dream of writing a gritty noir but complete a cozy featuring fish detectives. Or you want to write a cozy but end up with a spy thriller featuring 0 cats. Writing is what happens while you’re busy making other plots. If you go after something too directly, if you have an object, an idea that you feel strongly about and you try to represent it as it feels in your head and beats in your chest, you will very often make a mush out of it. So sometimes you need to approach your object in the night like a thief, like a spy scaling a cliff face in order to sneak into a mountaintop stronghold.… Read more

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Posted in Albert Dekker, Crime fiction, Noir fiction

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Pre-orders open for my monograph on Norman Jewison’s 1975 film, Rollerball

Posted on April 16, 2018 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

My monograph on Norman Jewison’s 1975 dystopian science fiction film, Rollerball, something I have been working on for the last couple of years, now has a cover and will soon be in the world via Constellations imprint of the independent film and media studies publisher, Auteur.

This is the first semi-academic publication I have written and I am excited but also a little nervous about how it is going to be received.

Rollerball depicts a future dominated by anonymous corporations and their executive elite, in which all individual effort and aggressive emotions are subsumed into a horrifically violent global sport, remains critically overlooked. What little has been written deals mainly with its place within the renaissance of Anglo-American science fiction cinema in the 1970s, or focuses on the elaborately shot, still visceral to watch, game sequences, so realistic they briefly gave rise to speculation Rollerball may become an actual sport.

Drawing on numerous sources, including little examined documents in the archive of the film’s screenwriter William Harrison,the book examines the many dimensions of Rollerball’s making and reception: the way it simultaneously exhibits the aesthetics and narrative tropes of mainstream action and art-house cinema; the elaborate and painstaking process of world creation undertaken by Jewison and Harrison; and the cultural forces and debates that influenced them, including the increasing corporate power and growing violence in Western society in late 1960s and early 1970s.… Read more

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Posted in Albert Dekker, Dystopian cinema, Rollerball, Science fiction and fantasy

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Pulp Friday: British horror pulp

Posted on October 27, 2017 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Halloween approaches and, as has been my habit over the last couple of years, I want to mark the occasion with a bit of pulp. Horror pulp, actually. British horror pulp, to be exact.

American horror pulp got a bit of love on this site a little while ago, when I reviewed Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks From Hell: The Twisted History of ‘70s and ‘80s Horror Fiction, a history of American horror from the 1970 and 1980s.

But I reckon the Brits have always done horror pulp really well. And, if you want proof, feast your eyes on the wonderful selection of British horror pulp from the 1960s and 1970s, all sourced from my collection, including a couple of ultra rare Hammer paperback film tie-ins I own.

Enjoy Halloween.

… Read more

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Posted in Adrian McKinty, Albert Dekker, British pulp fiction, Horror, New English Library, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art

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The Killers 1964 & 1946

Posted on December 10, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 7 Comments

The following is posted as part of Furious Cinema’s Scenes of the Crime Blog-a-Thon. It originally appeared in the Fall 2012 edition of Noir City.

One short story, Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers, which appeared in 1927, two film versions.  Robert Siodmak directed the first in 1946. Don Siegel helmed the later in 1964. Both films begin with the premise of Hemingway’s 2951 word piece; two anonymous professional killers hired to murder a man, but in most other respects are completely different.

Siodmak’s movie opens, to the accompaniment of Miklos Rozsa’s brassy jazz score, with the arrival of the killers in a small town. It’s night and all we see are their silhouettes backlit by streetlights. First they check the filling station. Finding it closed, they cross the road, go into Henry’s Diner. You can tell they’re professionals, each enters a different way, cutting off any possibility of their quarry escaping.

In the space of a few minutes, Al (Charles McGraw) and Max (William Conrad), establish a sense of menace and disorientation as good as any classic noir cinema has to offer. After rubbishing the diner’s food and the customer’s small town ways, they tell George, the man behind the counter:

“I tell you what we’re going to do, we’re going to kill the Swede.”

… Read more

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Posted in 1960s American crime films, Albert Dekker, Angie Dickinson, Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster, Film Noir, Lee Marvin, Parker

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