Search Results for: who needs a hard boiled detective

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Ten Pulp Things I Think I Think (August 2023)

“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun) Ten Things I Think I Think has become an occasional feature in my column here. I’m always up to my elbows in various reading, writing, gaming, TV/streaming, radio plays, and audiobooks. So it’s probably no…

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Norbert Davis’ Max Latin

“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun) A Black Gat in the Hand makes a rare Fall guest appearance! I think that John D. MacDonald was one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century – in any genre. He’s my favorite…

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: David Dodge

“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun) I have discovered several writers I like, such as Day Keene, Pete Hamill, and Richard Powell, through the Hard Case Crime imprint. Another writer they reissued is David Dodge. Dodge wrote To Catch a Thief,…

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Sci-Fi Meets Police Procedural – Asimov’s Baley & Olivaw

You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun) So… it’s a sneak preview, as A (Black) Gat in the Hand returns for the fifth straight summer. How about that? We’ll get going full bore after I get back from Howard Days, but here’s…

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: C.M. Kornbluth’s Pulp

Steven H Silver and I shared office space in the dungeon…cellar…basement….journalist’s suite (yeah, that’s it) at the Black Gate World Headquarters. Then, Steven published his cool new novel, After Hastings, and got moved above ground level. He tapped out a message to me on the pipes and said that it has taken a while for his eyes to get used to all that natural light. But before he moved on up, we worked on the joint post you are now…

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand – Bogart and Bacall’s ‘Bold Venture’

“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (Gat — Prohibition Era termsp for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun) In 1951 and 1952, a radio series named Bold Venture was a syndicated radio show, under the aegis of Santana Productions. Santana, named after his boat, was Humphrey Bogart’s company, to create and produce projects…

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Between the Years When the Oceans Drank (Henry Kuttner’s) Atlantis, and the Rise of COVID-19 — Elak Lives Again!

Adrian Cole is hardly a stranger to fantasy fiction. Born in Plymouth, Devonshire in 1949, Adrian first read The Lord of the Rings in the late 1960s while working in a public library in Birmingham, and was inspired by the book to write an epic entitled “The Barbarians,” which was eventually revised into The Dream Lords trilogy, published by Zebra Books in the early 1970s. He has been writing various ghost, horror, and fantasy tales, in both short-story and novel-length,…

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: All Through the Night (Bogart)

“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun) Today it’s a look at All Through the Night – one of my five favorite Bogie films, but not one that makes too many Top 10 lists. In 1940, Bogart’s career really started its climb,…

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Bullets or Ballots (Bogart)

“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun) Humphrey Bogart worked his way up the ladder at Warner Brothers, frequently playing a bad guy who went up against James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson, who were big stars and a part of Warner’s…

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Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: The Careworn Cuff – Part One (The Greenstreet Chronicles)

I’ve previously mentioned the radio show, The Adventures of Nero Wolfe, starring Sidney Greenstreet. And back in 2017, to middling results, I had written up one of those episodes, Stamped for Murder, as a novella. I tried to stay too true to the dialogue, and to Greenstreet’s rather un-Wolfean portrayal. But, you only have to kick me in the head three or four times before I catch on, so I decided to try again. Below is the first installment of a…

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