Tag Archives: Raymond Chandler

“Go. Sleep badly. Any questions, hesitate to call.” Projection Booth episode 463: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Posted on April 16, 2020 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Okay everyone, time to stop watching Tiger King and get into to some quality popular culture.

Episode 463 of one my favourite film podcasts has just hit the airwaves and is on the 2005 crime film, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. You can access the episode in full from the Projection Booth website at this link.

I join the hardest working man in podcasting, Projection Booth host, Mike White, and crime writer, Jedidiah Ayres, to discuss this deceptively complex piece of crime cinema. Mike also did an interview with the film’s director, Shane Black.

Among the things we cover in this show are the film’s myriad of pop culture references, everything from Sunset Boulevard (1950) to the long running Mike Shayne private investigator pulp series by Brett Halliday, its links to the work of Raymond Chandler, and what one of us (okay, it was me) termed ‘the Shane Black formula’ of film making and storytelling. We also give a lot of love to his other films, particularly the misanthropic delight of The Last Boy Scout (1991), and discuss Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’s metafictional elements. … Read more

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Posted in 1980s American crime films, 1990s American crime films, Crime film, Neo Noir

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A sit down with the Godfather: an interview with Peter Corris

Posted on September 1, 2018 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

As promised in my recent piece to mark the passing of Australian crime writer, Peter Corris, it gives me great pleasure to post a terrific, in-depth interview with the author that appeared in issue 14 of  the now defunct online journal, Crime Factory, in September 2013.The interview was conducted by avid crime reader and regular Crime Factory contributor, Andrew Prentice.

Crime Factory: Your pre-writing career was academia and journalism, wasn’t it?

Peter Corris: Yes

Where did the shift take place into writing novels?

I was working at the National Times when the first of the Hardy books came out, in 1980. I was the literary editor, sending the books out, doing the reviews, and also doing some interviewing pieces, sports people, politicians…and the first book was a success, very well reviewed.

That was The Dying Trade?

That’s the one. And I’d already finished the second one because I enjoyed doing the first one so much, and had started a third one, and well, the ball just got rolling, even though it took about 5 years for the first one to get published. I gave up the journalism and was bringing in enough from the books and writing short stories to get going. I should add I had a working wife as well, which was helpful.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian crime film, Australian noir, Australian popular culture, Australian pulp fiction, Australian television history, Bryan Brown, Crime Factory, Crime fiction, James Ellroy, Peter Corris

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Pulp Friday: Guns with plots

Posted on May 18, 2018 by Andrew Nette| 8 Comments

Let’s make one thing clear. I don’t own a gun. Never have and never will. Indeed, the only guns I want to see are in film or on the cover of books like the ones featured in today’s Pulp Friday post.

For a while now I have been obsessed with the cover above of the 1964 Panther edition of Len Deignton’s The Ipcress File. The cover, done by influential English graphic designer, Ray Hawkey, who would go onto to do a number of paperback covers, exudes a style and tone I could never imagine being used today except as a deliberate retro homage.

It speaks to the everyday grime, drudgery and unglamorous boredom of the Cold War spy racket, which the Deighton novels featuring the working class spy, Harry Palmer, evoke so well. There is also the mess that comes with the trade: a cold cup of tea (probably cold); cigarettes, because in the sixties every fictional spy smoked; paperclips for the paperwork; and, a gun and bullets, because sometimes you have to kill someone.

It is a gritty, cluttered layout I associate with mass paperback novels of the type that were largely targeted at men in the 1960s and 1970s. As it turns out, a bit of a dig around reveals it was a style that was widely used in those two decades – but it also bled over into the 1980s – by mass market paperback publishers in the crime, mystery and espionage thriller categories.… Read more

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Posted in Belmont Tower Books, British pulp fiction, Crime fiction, George V Higgins, Ian Fleming, Neo Noir, Noir fiction, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Spies, True crime

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Beat Not the Bones & the story of an Australian Edgar Allan Poe Award winner

Posted on April 19, 2016 by Andrew Nette| 13 Comments

Beat Not the Bones Avon 1955As many of the my US readers will no doubt be aware, America’s foremost crime writing awards, the annual Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Awards, will be presented on April 28.

The upcoming awards make it an opportune time to revisit the winner of the Edgar Award in 1954. That book was called Beat Not the Bones, and it was written not by an American but by an Adelaide-born woman called Geraldine Halls, writing under the pseudonym, Charlotte Jay. That the winner the next year was Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, gives you some idea how prestigious Halls’ win was.

Why some writers and their books go onto achieve lasting literary fame, while others, in this case Halls and her considerable work, sink into obscurity, always fascinates me. In a writing career stretching from 1951 to her last published novel in 1995, she produced fifteen books. Seven of these appeared under the pseudonym of Jay, her maiden name, and seven as Geraldine Halls, Halls being her married name. Another was published under the alias Geraldine Mary Jay.

There is very little information available about Halls, who died in Adelaide in October 1996, and the only image I could find on the Internet is on the Austlit site and is taken from the Adelaide Advertiser, dated May 8, 1853.… Read more

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Posted in Adrian McKinty, Australian crime fiction, Book Reviews

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Pulp Friday: Playback by Raymond Chandler

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

This week’s Pulp Friday offering needs no introduction, Raymond Chandler’s Playback.

Playback was Chandler’s last book, published in 1958, a year before his death, and based on a screenplay he had written several years earlier. It features his iconic creation Philip Marlowe.

This is an Australian version of the book, published locally by Horwitz Publications in 1961.

Based in Sydney but with offices in Melbourne, Horwitz Publications was established in 1921. It started out doing trade publications and sporting magazines, but by the fifties had branched into popular and pulp fiction, including mystery, thrillers, romance and westerns.

The company published locally sourced stories, as well as Australians editions of overseas works. Well know authors included Carter Brown, Marshall Grover and Marc Brody. Some of its best known names were pseudonyms used by multiple writers.

Horwitz ceased producing fiction in the late nineties.

Although Playback is considered the weakest of Chandler’s seven novels, I’m sure you’ll agree with me the cover is a beauty.

The blurb on the back is also a vintage hard boiled prose.

“The Redhead didn’t look like a tramp, not did she look like a crook.

But when hard-boiled Philip Marlowe was paid to tail her he got plenty besides information.” … Read more

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Posted in Australian pulp fiction, Horwitz Publications, Noir fiction, Pulp Friday, Raymond Chandler, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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