More from Starr on noir

Kevin Starr's California mentions noir again, this time at the beginning of a chapter on the arts:

"The twentieth century witnessed the debut of three entertainment media—film, radio, and television—dependent upon electronic technologies developed in California. Each of these media, film especially, took root in Southern California as it matured. To the traditional concerns of literature in California—nature, naturalism, and bohemia—were added the noir worldview and the apocalypse."

Has anyone ever argued with a lighter touch that crime movies and novels ought to be taken seriously? It's a truism that the hard-boiled loner of American crime fiction sprang from the Western, but how many people have  found a geographic source for noir? Instead of asking "What is noir?" (and risking decapitation by Anthony Neil Smith), perhaps we might more fruitfully ask where noir came from—and why.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Find Skuld! and find McKinty

Matteo Strukul's and Marco Piva Dittrich's Find Skuld! has an opening paragraph that should grab your attention:

"Call me fuckin’ Ishmael."

If that opening suggests American-style hard-boiled attitude and sullen slacker wiseassery on the part of the novella's Italian creators, its subtitle evokes over-the-top new-pulp sensibility with a touch of the old-time British adventure story. That subtitle is Chimaera: Anti Nazi Squad. The story, in other words, is a fine piece of global genre-hopping.

Find Skuld! takes a two-man commando squad deep under a castle hideaway to rescue Skuld from the Nazis. What is Skuld? Read the book to find out.

If this suggests Indiana Jones to you, know that the imprint of which the novella is a part is called Popcorn, and its slogan is "When reading a book is like watching a movie with some pop corn and a coke!" (Other Popcorn authors include Victor Gischler and Anthony Neil Smith.)

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Over at Adrian McKinty's place, McKinty jumps the gun and links to the first review of his In the Morning I'll Be Gone, third of the Sean Duffy novels, following Cold Cold Ground and I Hear the Sirens in the Streets.

I've read the book in galley form, too, and I'll add to the reviewer's comments that it reminds me in a small way of Dashiell Hammett's story "Fly Paper."  It's no wandering daughter job but, like Hammett's story, McKinty's novel embraces a hoary murder-mystery motif and works it with great success into a story that is far from a traditional mystery.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Blasted Heath: Cool name, exciting new e-book "imprint"

Allan Guthrie, author, agent, editor, noir scholar, and e-book evangelist, has now turned publisher, with Blasted Heath,  promising about thirty e-book titles a year.

The initial offerings include Anthony Neil Smith's All the Young Warriors, which humanizes international conflicts in a way that not even Twitter and Facebook can. Two Somali students kill a pair of Minnesota police officers, then flee to their native land to join the fight to liberate it, even though there seems little to liberate the terrified, anarchic country from. Disillusionment, love, and adventure ensue both in Somalia and back home, where an angry cop and the gang-leader father of one of the students team up.

Smith offers chilling descriptions of what religious fundamentalism does to both its targets and its believers, and even more chilling descriptions of Minnesota's winter winds, just what we need as we bid fall goodbye here in the Northeast.  Thanks, A.N.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011