Ed Brubaker´s gritty exploration of crime stories, their clichés and their stereotypes, while maintaining its class and naturalism

Usually noir games suck ass. This one doesn´t. You play a LAPD detective circa 1947. You explore Los Angeles, interrogate victims and suspects and you dodge hails of bullets. Itś time intensive, involving and very atmospheric. Like noir but with pixels. Time to see if I can fix my PS3.

Stray Bullets is an ongoing series that explores the often tragic events of a wide-ranging cast of characters over a sprawling 20 year cycle from the early 1970's to the mid-1990's. It is noir through-and-through. Sad that a book like this can't find an audience and Lapham has to put his career-defining masterpiece on hold to pay the bills. That's life and tat's noir I guess.

Leather Maiden: Lansdale is like puff cheetos for me. Can’t read just one. This one is a modern day thriller, taught and scary like most Lansdales. A gift for the parched, needing a great high-octane and smart read. Little far-fetched, but Lansdale’s story-telling gift smooths out the rough patches.

Noir of the Week: Released in the UK as Build my Gallows High for  the original story. Very apt. It stars Robert Mitchum as Jeff Bailey, a small-town gas pumper, has his mysterious past catch up with him one day when he's ordered to meet with gambler Whit Sterling. En route to the meeting, he tells girlfriend Ann his story filled with flashbacks, double-crosses, stolen money and femme-fatales. Out of the Past is the ultimate noir. 

Memorable Quotes: My feelings? About ten years ago, I hid them somewhere and haven't been able to find them. 

From the Noir Vault: English writer Robin Cook (no, not the medical thriller writer) took on a pseudonym annd broke every taboo in the book. His nameless police detective is a nod to Hammet’s Continental Op with existentialist gloom and brutality ramped up to the nth degree. The murder victim that his unnamed protagonist investigates is clearly based on the writer's own life, so this odd, brutal and defiant police procedural becomes a thinly disguised autobiography as we read further. Suprisingly warm and humane, if not human.

Breaking Bad. Set and produced in Albuquerque, New Mexico, it's the story of Walter White played by Bryan Cranston, a struggling high school chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. He turns to a life of crime, producing and selling methamphetamine with a former student, Jesse Pinkman played by Aaron Paul, with the aim of securing his family's financial future before he dies. One of best crime-series on television and it's a neck-and-neck tie with Justified.

Barkeep said, yeah, I've heard your name down the way and I kick motherfucking asses like you every day Mr. Stagger Lee. Well those were the last words that the barkeep said 'cause stag put four holes in his motherfucking head

Time Shift - Nordic Noir: The Story of Scandinavian Crime Fiction 

Just A Perfect Day, Problems All Left Alone, Weekenders On Our Own. It's Such Fun. Just A Perfect Day, You Made Me Forget Myself. I Thought I Was Someone Else, Someone Good.

A man in a suit comes up to you. He hands you a briefcase which contains a gun, 100 untraceable bullets and enough evidence to prove without a doubt who ruined your life and how. You are assured that no matter what you do, there will be no repercussions. What do you do? THat is the question that author Brian Azzarello and his partner Eduardo Risso postulate in this 100 issue comic-book maxi-series called 100 Bullets. These are explosive vignettes, short-stories that link, intertwine and weave one of the most intricate back-stories, an arch that Lost or Heroes or any other prime-time network show would kill to have done this well.

Christa Faust’s Hoodtown is an awesome mixture of two of my favorite geek habitats: Mexican wrestlers and noir. Hard-boiled prose, with masks. She postulates a world where there are people who from practically birth put on wrestler masks, sort of a subset of humanity, a race or ethnic group if you want to call it that, and they are downtrodden, they live in their own urban ghetto with their own services and they rarely mix with the rest of humanity. 


The book is political and has its own well thought out social commentary about have and have-not, a perfect noir situation I might add, but it is downright fun. Faust is more of a pulp writer than straigh-out noir and her female protagonist plays out like a cross between El Santo and Red Sonja, but she juggles the varying influences deftly. It reads quick and clean, and is not bogged down by the kitchen-sink approach to world-building


an excellenbt read. Enjoy

Boney's high on china white, Shorty found a punk. Don't you know there ain't no devil? There's just God when he's drunk. Well this stuff will probably kill you, let's do another line. What you say you meet me down on Heartattack and Vine.

Darwyn Cooke's minimalist interpretation and adaptation of Richard Stark's Parker novels continues with The Outfit. After the events of The Hunter, Parker is living well but he is soon up against The Outfit again after being double-crossed by an informant.

Noir of the Week: Murder My Sweet

Starring: Dick Powell as Raymond Chandler’s P.I. Philip Marlowe. Powell is too short, too ordinary and doesn’t have much stage presence for Marlowe, but this is still Chandler. The words are on the paper.


Memorable Quote: "She was a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud. I gave her a drink. She was a gal who'd take a drink, if she had to knock you down to get the bottle.

The American definition of masculinity has changed greatly in the 20th century. At the turn of the 20th century, it was defined by a shared cultural identity that stressed a white, middle-class, frontier-era mythology of America that was built on societal ideals of individualism and self-reliance.

At the end of the century that shared cultural identity has become fractured and is now defined by conflicting racial, ethnic, sexual and societal norms. For most of the century this had been a gradual metamorphosis in the societal role of the American male but World War II brought about that massive societal change quickly. The popular culture of the time, especially the moody film noir thrillers of the 1940's and 1950's, recorded that change.

In the 1944 film Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo a young American aviator tells his friends about his expectations returning home after the victory in World War II. "When it's all over, just think, being able to settle down and never be in doubt about anything." The typical World War II veteran was optimistic that victory abroad would return him to his proper role and place in society. The war had ended decades of economic stagnation, and winning on the battlefield renewed a lost faith in his masculine identity. It dispelled, for a time, the fears and inadequacies that he had lived through as a child of the Great Depression. He yearned to return to his traditional American role as the unchallenged benefactor; giving aid to those at home and at work.

I'd have been the shadow of your shadow if I thought it might have kept me by your side - J. Brel

I’ve been reading the Richard Stark novels and wanted to put a face to Parker, and no one is better than Lee Marvin at the sort of hard-boiled nutjob that Westlake, I mean Richard Stark, writes about. So I rented Point Blank by John Boorman. It’s a fairly avante-garde movie, somewhere between 50’s cool and 60’s groovy, a bit tiki actually. It’s the standard revenge plot that was redone in Mel Gibson’s Payback, but this seems infinitely better. Not as straight an adaptation of The Hunter as Payback was, but Boorman knows how to set up the shot. Have to say too, Angie Dickinson is a sight to behold.

“The office women looked at him and shivered. They knew he was a bastard, they his big hands were born to slap with, they knew his face would never break into a smile when he looked at a woman. They knew what he was, they thanked God for their husbands, and still they shivered. Because they knew how he would fall on a woman in the night. Like a tree" - The Hunter