Film noir productions generally are associated with dark settings, either because action takes place at night or in unlit rooms, where street light creeps through Venetian blinds and struggles all the way to hit the protagonists on the set. Originally, such an outcome on the set in part was caused by filming conditions during wartime, […]
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Tag: Hard-boiled fiction
Perplexing Plots. Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder by David Bordwell (2023)
Generally, storytelling, narratives, modes of presentation and the story behind them, define most works of fiction and movie plots alike. As those techniques changed over the decades (as did audiences who step by step were introduced to this), new and exiting ways of shooting film and presenting characters entered popular forms of entertainment. The simple, […]
Noir Fiction and Film: Diversions and Misdirections by Lee Clark Mitchell (2022)
With some interesting observations and a huge collection of data about genres in the book under discussion here, there are some good and fresh points concerning style, method and procedure, even when hard-boiled fiction and films noir are reduced to their most basic configurations. Naturally, there are variations of the stereotypes and, with regard to […]
The Detective and the Artist: Painters, Poets and Writers in Crime Fiction, 1840s – 1970s by J.K. Va
In the majority of crime fiction, there exists a relationship between the main characters. “The Detective and the Artist, then, concentrates upon the role played by poets, novelists, and painters in the detective story. These specialists in the production of works of aesthetic imagination are set in radical contrast to the defining figure of the […]
James Ellroy and Voyeur Fiction by Nathan Ashman (2018)
In his masterpiece The Black Dahlia, in the first L.A. Quartet novel, James Ellroy presents a detective very much devoted to the murder of Elisabeth Short. Both Ellroy and Detective Bucky Bleichert become obsessed with the violent crime; Bleichert finally turns almost insane reconstructing both the case and the victim’s body. Ellroy in an interview […]
The Hard-Boiled Female Detective Novel: A Study of a Popular … by William R. Klink (2014)
The detective novel/mystery novel is by far not a strictly male genre, meaning that there are not just male authors writing detective fiction about male investigators. Some of the authors of the early British mystery novels were female; there would be no Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple without Agatha Christie; and Dorothy L. Sayers is […]