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Tag Archives: Dashiell Hammett
Book reviews: Deadly dames, midcentury Brit pulp and 1970s science fiction
Yes, it’s been a while since my last post, and during this time a few pulp and popular fiction related studies have come across my radar that I’m very keen to let Pulp Curry readers know about.
The first is of these is The Trials of Hank Janson by Steve Holland. If you are not familiar with Steve’s work then you need to rectify that and a good way to do this is to visit his site Bear Alley, where you will find a wealth of writing about British comics and pulp fiction. The second step is to pick up a copy of The Trials of Hank Janson, a slightly expanded reissue of a book originally published by Holland in 2004, when it shortlisted for the prestigious Gold Dagger Award by the UK Crime Writers’ Association.
Janson was one of the most successful British pulp writers of the 1940s and early 1950s. His books during this time were violent faux American crime tales in a similar vein to the work of James Hadley Chase and Australia’s Carter Brown: gritty gangster tales, full of American slang and detail, set in large American cities such as Chicago or New York. In the UK context, these books were part of a much larger wave of faux American crime fiction that swept the country in the postwar period (a trend which I wrote about for US site CrimeReads here).… Read more
Posted in Australian crime fiction, Book cover design, Book Reviews, British crime cinema, British pulp fiction, Carter Brown, Dangerous Visions and New Worlds Radical Science Fiction 1950 to 1985, James Hadley Chase, Men's Adventure Magazines, Pulp fiction, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Science fiction and fantasy, Vintage pulp paperback covers
Tagged 1950-1985, Adam Rowe, Carter Brown aka Alan Yates, Claudia Lesser, Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, Dashiell Hammett, Elaine Reynolds, faux American crime fiction, Hank Janson, Horace McCoy, James Hadley Chase, John D MacDonald, Johnny Liddell, Lisa Karen, men’s adventure magazines, Raymond Chandler, Ron Lesser, skeletons in space suits, Stephen Daniel Frances, Steve Holland, The Art of Ron Lesser Vol 1: Deadly Dames and Sexy Sirens, W. R. Burnett, Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s
M Emmet Walsh and Blood Simple
“Well Ma’am if I see him, I’ll sure give him the message.”
The late Roger Ebert called it the “Stanton-Walsh Rule”. Any movie “featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M.Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can’t be altogether bad”.
I’ve always liked Walsh as a character actor. But it was only when I recently re-watched the Cohen Bother’s Blood Simple after many year, that I realised just how on the money Ebert was.
Walsh plays a seedy PI called Loren Visser. Visser hired by a rich Texan bar owner, Julian (Dan Hedaya), to kill his wife, Abby (a very young Francis McDormand), who is cheating with one of Julian’s employees, Ray (John Getz).
If you haven’t seen Blood Simple, it won’t spoil your viewing pleasure too much if I tell you Visser kills Julian, tries to frame Abbey for the murder, and all manner of hell is unleashed.
On one level, Blood Simple comes across as a fairly standard small town film noir. Characters chase their own shadows and do very bad things in an effort to extract themselves from an increasingly fraught and dangerous situation.
What really raises it about the pack of similar films is the Cohen brother’s signature brand of dark weirdness, which managers to be both restrained and shocking. … Read more
Posted in 1970s American crime films, 1980s American crime films, Film Noir, James Woods, M Emmet Walsh
Tagged Blade Runner (1982), Blood Simple (1984), Dan Hedaya, Dashiell Hammett, Edward Bunker, Fast Walking (1982), Francis McDormand, Harry Dean Stanton, James Woods, M Emmet Walsh, No Beast So Fierce, Red Harvest, Roger Ebert, Straight Time (1978)