Category Archives: Heist films

Pre-orders open for my new novel, Orphan Road

Posted on April 25, 2023 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Just a quick heads up to let you know that you can now pre-order my new crime novel, Orphan Road.

You can order it from the publisher, Down and Out Books. It is also available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

For pre-order information, check out this link. You should also be able to order it through your local bookstore, closer to the date.

Orphan Road is a sequel of sorts to my last novel, Gunshine State.

The pitch is as follows:

Gary Chance is an ex-Australian army driver and nightclub bouncer turned professional thief and
in need of a job. An offer comes from a former employer, once notorious Melbourne social
identity, now aging owner of a failing S&M club, Vera Leigh.

A shadowy real estate developer is trying to squeeze Leigh out of a rapidly gentrifying city. But she has a rescue plan that involves one of Australia’s biggest heists, Melbourne’s Great Bookie Robbery. On April 21, 1976, a well organised gang stole as much as three million dollars, a fortune at the time, from a Melbourne bookmakers club. The money was never recovered. No one was ever charged. And everyone associated with the crime has since died, either by natural causes or violently.

Leigh maintains that money was not the only thing stolen that day.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian crime film, Australian noir, Garry Disher, Gunshine State, Heist films

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Cover reveal: Orphan Road, my follow up to Gunshine State

Posted on April 17, 2023 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

I am a fast nonfiction writer, but a much slower writer of fiction. So, it has been a while between novels for me. In fact, since Gunshine State was first published in 2016, to be precise. But I have a new crime novel, Orphan Road, coming out via Down and Out Books in late May.

And here is the cover, designed by J. T. Lindroos.

While the story of Orphan Road had been bouncing around in my head for a while now, I finally managed to find the time to write it during Melbourne’s three Covid lockdowns. It is a short, sharp sequel to Orphan Road, featuring the same character from that novel, Gary Chance.

The pitch is as follows:

Gary Chance is an ex-Australian army driver and nightclub bouncer turned professional thief and
in need of a job. An offer comes from a former employer, once notorious Melbourne social
identity, now aging owner of a failing S&M club, Vera Leigh.

A shadowy real estate developer is trying to squeeze Leigh out of a rapidly gentrifying city. But she has a rescue plan that involves one of Australia’s biggest heists, Melbourne’s Great Bookie Robbery. On April 21, 1976, a well organised gang stole as much as three million dollars, a fortune at the time, from a Melbourne bookmakers club.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian noir, Gunshine State, Heist films, Orphan Road

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Register for on-line NoirCon 2022

Posted on October 10, 2022 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

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

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Posted in 1960s American crime films, 1970s American crime films, 1980s American crime films, 1990s American crime films, Asian noir, Australian noir, Crime fiction, Crime film, David Goodis, Femme fatale, Film Noir, French cinema, Heist films, Neo Noir, Noir Con, Noir fiction, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp fiction set in Asia, Pulp paperback cover art, Tart noir, Tartan Noir, True crime

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10 underappreciated American neo-noirs of the early 1970s

Posted on July 27, 2022 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

The domestic blowback of the Vietnam War. The sleaze and corruption of Watergate. The incipient rollback of the counterculture and many gains of the 1960s. Economic recession. The upheaval and uncertainty in the 1970s may have been tough on America’s collective psyche, but it resulted in some incredibly good crime cinema, particularly prior to Jaws in 1975, which helped to usher in the culture of the cinematic blockbuster.

And while I will happily admit to being a due paying member of the First-half-of-the-1970s-was-a-great-period-of-American-crime-cinema-fan-club, it does strike me that we tend to focus on the same handful of films from this period over and over. Yes, The French Connection and Shaft (1971), The Godfather (1972), The Friends of Eddie Coyle and The Long Goodbye (1973), and Chinatown (1974), are all masterful neo noirs that in some way enlarged the culture’s notion of what crime cinema could be.

But the wellspring of American neo noir on the screen in the first half of the decade runs very deep, and it pays major viewing dividends to explore it more widely. My latest piece for the US site CrimeReads looks at ten underappreciated neo noirs from the first half of the seventies that are worth your time. You can read the piece in full on the CrimeReads site via this link.… Read more

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Posted in 1960s American crime films, 1970s American crime films, 1980s American crime films, Anthony Zerbe, Blaxsploitation, Cinema culture, Crime film, Heist films, John Frankenheimer, Neo Noir, Noir fiction, Paul Newman, Robert Stone, Stuart Rosenberg, Yaphet Kotto

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Ten underappreciated American noirs of the late 1950s and 1960s

Posted on November 25, 2021 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

While preparing for a recent appearance on a podcast episode about John Boorman’s 1967 film, Point Blank, I thought a lot about American noir cinema of the very late 1950s and the 1960s. I find it interesting that so many of the films made during this time remain unknown and underappreciated relative to the classic film noir period, generally regarded as beginning with John Huston’s 1941 classic The Maltese Falcon and ending in 1958, and the body of American crime cinema known as neo noir, which took off in the early 1970s. My latest piece for the US site CrimeReads is on this strange, partly forgotten period of American noir cinema that came between classic film noir & 1970s neo-noir, and 10 great underrated/unknown films that were released during it. You can read it in full on the CrimeReads site here.… Read more

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Posted in 1960s American crime films, 1970s American crime films, 1980s American crime films, Crime film, Film Noir, Heist films, Neo Noir

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