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!