Media Blitz

Two posts in a month? Something big must be happening.

And it is. Renee Patrick returns to Turner Classic Movies. Tune in this Sunday, October 29, as Rosemarie and I once again join our friend Eddie Muller on his show Noir Alley. Gaze upon us in spellbound wonder as we talk about the extraordinary career of Edith Head both before and after one of her films, 1946’s The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. Edith dressing not one but two red hot stone cold femmes fatale in Barbara Stanwyck and Lizabeth Scott, Kirk Douglas making his big-screen debut, and stories galore. That’s Sunday, October 29, at 10 am EST / 7 am PST.

A note on recording the show, especially if you’re on the West Coast. Strange Love runs 116 minutes. (Lots of twists.) Right now TCM has it in a two-hour time slot, so if you record that you’ll likely get the introduction but not the (shocking!) end of the film or the outro, where we dish about Edith some more. So you might want to set that DVR for an extra 15 minutes or so, just to be safe.

But that’s not all. While we were attending Bouchercon in Toronto, we had the pleasure of appearing on one of our favorite podcasts, Writer Types hosted by Eric Beetner and S.W. Lauden. It’s a jam-packed affair that includes friends like Bill Crider and our fellow Anthony Award nominees Bill Beverly, Art Taylor, and Jim Ziskin. Give a listen.

Extra, Extra! Noir City!

Back from an eventful trip to Bouchercon in Toronto, where Renee Patrick’s debut novel Design for Dying was nominated for both the Anthony and Macavity Awards. (Spoiler alert: we didn’t win.) My co-alter ego Renee posted photos.

While Rosemarie and I were abroad, the latest issue of Noir City, house rag of the Film Noir Foundation, dropped. Many in our stellar stable of contributors pull double duty for your edification—

Imogen Sara Smith cover stories Jean-Pierre Melville’s centenary and appraises a long-thought-lost silent Polish noir;

Jake Hinkson sizes up Georges Simenon as the ultimate noir scribe and offers a timely reconsideration of the rise of homegrown American fascism in All the King’s Men;

Sean Axmaker makes the case for both Peter Gunn as “the great small-screen incarnation of film noir” and the yuletide mayhem of The Ice Harvest as his favorite neo-noir.

What about me, you ask? Aren’t you kind to keep me in your thoughts. My column Cocktails & Crime is here, naturally, and Sean Axmaker and I tag-team the recent Seattle International Film Festival. But mainly I’m flexing my editorial muscle this time around, taking full credit for bringing you Ray Banks’ compelling overview of 1950s U.K. noir films that deal with racism, and Nathalie Atkinson’s look at Hard Case Crime’s foray into the world of comics.

Plus there’s Alan K. Rode on the Hollywood odyssey of writer Frank Fenton; Steve Kronenberg on the tragic tale of Linda Darnell; Brian Light on Vertigo, the book and the film; and much more. Honestly, it’s an embarrassment of riches, is what it is.

All that bounty, simply a donation to the Film Noir Foundation away. Get cracking!