I first saw The Outfit one Sunday night about thirty years ago on the local ABC affiliate, which ran old movies after the late news. I was a film major at the University of Maryland at the time. Back then there were fewer sources of film information (no internet, no IMDB), so if you had [...]
Category Archive for ‘Film’ 
Italian Mayhem
Jan 23, 2012 in Film, Guest Posts
Today Mulholland Books celebrate the publication of George Pelecanos’ new novel WHAT IT WAS with a guest post by George on films from the 1970s, the era in which his newest is set. WHAT IT WAS is available as an ebook for only 99 cents for one month only. A trade paperback edition is also [...]
Cold Blood: On Jim Thompson and Stanley Kubrick
Jan 13, 2012 in Film, Guest Posts, Writing
This article was originally published in One More Robot #8 In the mind of crime fiction aficionados, the brooding image of pulp writers from the 40s and 50s usually resembles a haunting Edward Hooper painting of doomed loners sloughed at a rickety desk inside a dimly lit hotel room. Knocking out stories for a penny [...]
Fractured Reflection: Representations of the Psychopath and Society in Mary Harron’s Film Adaptation of American Psycho and Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me
Dec 12, 2011 in eBooks, Film, Guest Posts
The below article initially appeared on www.CrimeCulture.com and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the sites’ administrators and the author. There have been numerous representations of the psychopath or serial killer in crime literature. Many texts depict this figure as a metaphorical embodiment of his society’s moral deviations, or consciously use his killings [...]
The Book of a Lifetime
Oct 21, 2011 in Film, Guest Posts
This essay first appeared in the London Independentand is reprinted with the kind permission of Alan Glynn. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald is one of those rare books that shouldn’t ever be adapted for the screen. Seriously. But it keeps happening. And now Baz Luhrmann is making a version of it in 3D [...]
The Double – Origin Story
Oct 20, 2011 in Film, Guest Posts
One thing I’ve learned as a writer: everyone loves origin stories. The first question I get asked is “how did you become a writer?” It is usually followed by “how do I get an agent?” but that’s another ball of wax. Right behind that is: “how did this particular movie come to be?” This is [...]
Reviews of Drive and Contagion
Oct 06, 2011 in Film, Guest Posts
Drive, the stylish, stylized thriller from Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn, is not for everyone. It’s moody and challenging, sparse in dialogue and dreamlike…and aggressive in its violence in a way that few films are. The retro vibe of the trailers’ Eurosynth score and the bold pink font of the posters are the first of [...]
Totalitarian Fiction
Sep 26, 2011 in Books, Film, Guest Posts, Mulholland Authors
We kick off our week-long celebration of the publication of THE REVISIONISTS by Thomas Mullen, a book that Publishers Weekly called (in a starred review) an “excellent thriller set in the near future” and that Library Journal (also in a starred review) called “an outstanding dystopic novel.” Here, Mullen examines the world of totalitarian fiction. [...]
The Big Gundown
Sep 01, 2011 in Film, Guest Posts
A couple of nights ago I caught Sergio Solima’s The Big Gundown on Encore’s Western channel. I had seen it back in the late 60′s when I was a kid, in one of the movie palaces that had gone exploitation/blaxploitation/Spaghetti Western in post-riot Washington, D.C. It’s difficult to find on DVD, and is rarely shown [...]
A Series of Complaints
Mar 28, 2011 in Books, Film, Graphic Novels, Writing
When John Rebus retired at the end of Exit Music, I was free to experiment. I spent the next eighteen months or so writing my first graphic novel (Dark Entries), some lyrics for an Edinburgh band called St Jude’s Infirmary, a novella for people with literacy problems (A Cool Head), and a serial for the [...]
