Read: The Life of Dashiell Hammett
Like most books on Dashiell Hammett now, I was broadly aware of the contents of this volume before reading it. I had read a review of it written only a few years after it was published in 1983 - pretty...
View ArticleProduct Placement in Movies
Amongst the things I try to keep an eye on is the NPR Books Podcast, because well, some kind of American perspective is probably good to balance the British influence in my life. On the whole, I find...
View ArticleThe Dark Knight Rises
Finally saw this with Clare yesterday. I find myself deeply ambivalent about it. There was definitely a lot to love about it - it did all of the surface stuff quite well. Yet I left the theatre feeling...
View ArticleSix Walks in the Fictional Woods
Umberto Eco is one of the leading scholars in the field of "Semiotics", a term which I barely understand but which in my dummy's terms is about systems of signs. In my sub-specialist field of literary...
View ArticleThe Simple Art of Murdering Dashiell Hammett
I'm writing my masters thesis on Dashiell Hammett. You are an exceptionally well educated group of people and so may have heard of him, but my unscientific sampling of everyone I know suggests that you...
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1920s Monster Noir
I am looking for another player (or possibly two) for a 1920s Monster of the Week game. The game will run weekly-ish on either Mondays or Wednesdays. Two other players are signed up at this point -...
View ArticleQuestion 5
Marcus asked himself 12 Questions and I was playing along. He gave up at Question 4, and since I was following him, I stopped too. But, here's question 5:What was your favourite NPC to run?I didn't...
View ArticleSeen: Paul
I've been pretty ambivalent in my filmgoing experience. I just wasn't sure what conclusions to draw about, say, Barbara or Rampart - flawed movies, but where I felt there were some interesting things...
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Blood on the Moon
With James Ellroy's first "Lloyd Hopkins" novel I return to a general ambivalence about artistic consumption recently. I was first alerted to James Ellroy by steve_hix and Malcolm Craig, through a Dead...
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hypermurder
In my presentation the other day I dropped in a reference to my old drinking pal Baudrillard. What I argued was that in "Fair Play" murder mysteries, there is a disconnection between the criminal act...
View ArticleRead: Spade and Archer
by Joe GoresThere have been a number of recent revivifications of famous crime/trhiller authors for modern consumption. Front Row Daily compiled a special edition of interviews with the new authors...
View ArticleSeen: The Missing Person [2009]
I'm unsure of the provenance of this film, but I suspect it was straight-to-dvd and otherwise slithered without a trace into the world. It is about a private detective, Rosow, who is clearly an...
View ArticleThe Blue Dahlia [1946]
I last saw this more than a few years ago; I think while I was still at high school. It didn't make the same kind of impression on me that other classic films at the time did. I still remember vividly...
View ArticleLight & Dark
My flat hired and watched The Adjustment Bureau last night, and it was a strange experience. I felt a strong sense of de ja vu for the last 3rd of the film and it took me a little while to realize why...
View ArticleSeen: Serial Killer
In my theatre-going tonight, the role of Clare was played by my friend Chloe, so my comments are without Clare's usual additions and expansions. I saw the play at the Gryphon Theatre, which is a tiny...
View ArticleThe Chivalric Mystery
I attended a lecture by one of my esteemed former tutors on Chandler's The Big Sleep where he argued that in the subtext there is a Romance plot, a Chivalric plot. This is not the first time that I...
View ArticleSeen: The Name of the Rose [1986]
The one-sentence summary of my MA might be something like this - Crime fiction is not about solving a puzzle, it is about the contest for the rights to tell the story of the crime. In the execution of...
View ArticleRead: Hoodwink by Bill Pronzini
The joy, or hazard if you will, of reading a whole bunch of detective fiction is that you see a cross section of instances. Some are good and some are bad, and for different reasons. Chandler was a bit...
View ArticleThe Expert Leading The Blind
When I was studying Engineering we had a paper called "Structural Concepts". The brilliant lecturer, Jose Retrepo, was able to strip out all the complex maths and very simply demonstrate how you could...
View ArticleThe New Building Standard
Recently I've had a few conversations with people about the so-called "New Building Standard", which is part of the suite of ideas intended to make buildings in NZ "safe". By now it's pretty well...
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