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Category Archives: Crime Fiction and film set in Vietnam
Blowback: late 1960s and 1970s pulp and popular fiction about the Vietnam War
If you are still on the fence about purchasing a copy of my new book, Sticking it to the Man: Revolution and the Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980, the site CrimeReads is running a couple of extracts from the book. The first is my piece, ‘Blowback: late 1960s and 1970s pulp and popular fiction about the Vietnam War’.
The conflict in Vietnam cast a long shadow over pulp and popular fiction in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Vietnam veterans were hunted by small town redneck police in David Morrell’s 1972 novel, First Blood, dealt drugs in Vern E Smith’s The Jones Men, and staged an abortive bank heist in Dog Day Afternoon, both published in 1974. In the Lone Wolf series ex-New York cop and Vietnam veteran, Burt Wulff mounted a fourteen-book battle from 1973 to 1975 against the drug dealing criminal organisation, ‘The Network’, in which he treated the streets of America’s major cities as an extension of jungles of Southeast Asia. Vietnam was the training ground for many of the characters that populated men’s adventure and crime pulp in the 1970s. More broadly, Vietnam’s traumatic impact on American society would become a cypher through which pulp and popular fiction name checked cultural fragmentation, growing disillusionment with the American dream, dishonest and unaccountable government and corporations, and the power of the military industrial complex.… Read more
Posted in 70s American crime films, 80s American crime films, Asian noir, Australian crime fiction, Australian noir, Belmont Tower Books, Black pulp fiction, Blaxsploitation, Book cover design, Crime Fiction and film set in Vietnam, Crime film, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp fiction set in Asia, Pulp paperback cover art, Robert Stone, Sticking it the the Man Revolution and Counter Culture in Pulp and Popular Fiction 1950 1980
Tagged CrimeReads, David Morrell, Dog Day Afternoon, First Blood (1972), Pulp and popular fiction about Vietnam, Pulp fiction in Asia, Sticking it to the Man: Revolution and the Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction 1950 to 1980, Vietnam War
Continental Crime: A YouTube reading
In late 2017, LA based author, Eric Beetner and I discussed doing a crime reading reading on YouTube to mark the release of novels we both had coming out earlier this year through the same publisher, Down and Out Books. The idea sort of grew from there to encompass an author either based in or who had written fiction from at least one country in continent on the earth (with the exception of Antartica).
In addition to myself reading from Gunshine State and Eric reading from his novel, Rum Runners, the list includes Matthew Iden, Steph Broadribb, Mike Nicol, Elka Ray and Claudia Piñeiro.
For reasons which are obvious in retrospect, but didn’t seem so at the time, putting this together was not as easy as we thought it would be and took a long longer than we planned. In particularly, my take home lesson is crime fiction from Latin and South American is really underexposed outside that region.
Anyway we decided to call our YouTube reading Continental Crime. Hopefully you find a new voice you like and get exposed to the wonderful world of reading books from different cultures. A big thanks to Eric’s editing skills for pulling the final product together.
Enjoy.
Posted in 90s American crime films, Asian noir, Australian crime fiction, Australian noir, Crime fiction, Crime fiction and film from Africa, Crime Fiction and film set in Vietnam, Eurocrime, Gunshine State, Neo Noir, Noir fiction
Tagged Claudia Piñeiro, Continental Crime, Down and Out Books, Elka Ray, Eric Beetner, Gunshine State, Matthew Iden, Mike Nicol, Rum Runners, Steph Broadribb
My top 10 books of 2015
It’s time for my annual top 10 reads for the year. In no particular order they are as follows:
Bad Penny Blues, Cathi Unsworth
Bad Penny Blues kicks off in London in the early 1960s. A young police constable finds the body of a murdered prostitute. His subsequent investigation into the crime and similar murders, spanning the better part of a decade, propels him into the heart of the city’s Soho vice district. Interspersed with this is the story of a young and up and coming fashion designer, Stella, who is plagued by nightmares about dead women.
The fact I found this book a pinch too long didn’t detract from my enjoyment of it. Bad Penny Blues is a solid piece of noir fiction and a great evocation of sixties London, taking in everything from the occult, teddy boys, bent cops, radical bohemians and debauched upper class aristocrats.
The Tattoo Murder Case, Akimitsu Takagi
First published, albeit in a slightly different form, in 1948, a young forensic medical student with post-traumatic stress after a stint as a medic in the Philippines begins a passionate affair with a beautiful woman who is covered with strange, sexually alluring traditional Japanese tattoos. Soon after the affair begins, she is murdered, dismembered and her tattooed torso stolen from the scene of the crime.… Read more
Posted in Australian noir, Book Reviews, Crime fiction, Crime fiction and film from Japan, Crime Fiction and film set in Vietnam, Robert Stone, Science fiction and fantasy
Tagged Akimitsu Takagi, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Bad Penny Blues, Candice Fox, Cathi Unsworth, Dog Soldiers, Don Carpenter, erent Vice, Hades, Hard Rain Falling, Mark Dapin, Paula Rabinowitz, R&R, Roadside Picnic, Robert Stone, The Secret Speech, The Tattoo Murder Case, Thomas Pynchon, Tim Robb Smith
Post traumatic noir – a note on the passing of Robert Stone
The death of US writer Robert Stone on the weekend has drawn me out of the break I planned on posting on this site over January.
Stone was the author of two tremendous works of neo-noir fiction, both of which I read when I was first getting into the genre.
The first, Stone’s debut novel, A Hall of Mirrors, was published in 1967 and partly set in New Orleans, where Stone lived briefly. It dealt with a dissolute, opportunistic right wing radio broadcaster and the desperate, doomed characters he associates with. It was turned into an excellent film called WUSA by Stuart Rosenberg in 1970 and starring Paul Newman, then in the throws of his battling his own alcoholism (I reviewed it on this site a couple of years ago here.
The second, the better known and probably more influential of Stone’s books, Dog Soldiers, was published in 1974. The 1978 film adaption, Who’ll Stop The Rain (reviewed on this site here), is also very good.
Dog Soldiers concerns a liberal war correspondent in Vietnam, Converse, who disillusioned with what he has seen, decides to traffic heroin back to the US. He enlists Hicks, his friend in the merchant marines, to take the drugs back to Converse’s wife, Marge, in Los Angeles.… Read more
Posted in 60s American crime films, 70s American crime films, Crime fiction, Crime Fiction and film set in Vietnam, James Crumley, Newton Thornburg, Noir fiction, Robert Stone, Stuart Rosenberg
Tagged A Hall of Mirrors, Cutter and Bone, Dog Soldiers, Don Carpenter, George V Higgins, Neon Noir, Newton Thornburg, Robert Stone, Who'll Stop the Rain (1978), Woody Haut, WUSA