He wrote The Grifters, which was made into a film. Also The Getaway and After Dark, My Sweet. I like his autobiography, Bad Boy, also Pop. 1280 and The Golden Gizmo.
Wash: So, two days in a hospital? That's awful. Don't you just hate doctors? Simon: Hey. Wash: I mean, present company excluded. Jayne: Let's not be excluding people. That'd be rude.
'Ariel'
Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
Scrappy - Oct 09, 2007 5:13:02 pm PDT #4163 of 28222
Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
Jesse - Oct 09, 2007 5:17:46 pm PDT #4164 of 28222
Sometimes I trip on how happy we could be.
The Killer Inside Me! A Hell of a Woman!
Good times, good times. I'm pretty sure I stumbled over Thompson when I decided I should be reading more literature, so started pulling the trade paper from the Mystery shelves at the library.
DavidS - Oct 09, 2007 5:20:27 pm PDT #4165 of 28222
"Look, son, if it's good enough for Shirley Bassey, it's good enough for you."
The conventional wisdom I've always heard has been retronymic: French cinephiles observed the film patterns and described the trend just as it was ending, in the mid-50s; once film noir entered the critical parlance, the general term roman noir and its population of novelists began to be described.
I understood that Roman Noir preceded Film Noir as a coinage, because American hard-boiled novelists were packaged in black covered books in France.
In the same way that Italian thrillers became known as Giallo - which means yellow, and refers to the yellow covers of the source novels.
Hayden - Oct 09, 2007 5:37:06 pm PDT #4166 of 28222
aka "The artist formerly known as Corwood Industries."
erikaj - Oct 09, 2007 5:50:25 pm PDT #4167 of 28222
Always Anti-fascist!
Oh, yeah "The Grifters" Cusack was creepy in it.
DavidS - Oct 09, 2007 5:56:39 pm PDT #4168 of 28222
"Look, son, if it's good enough for Shirley Bassey, it's good enough for you."
I like Thompson a lot but prefer Willeford, especially his early stuff like The Pick Up and the High Priest of California and the Woman Chaser. (I have the movie version of the last on tape, starring Patrick Warburton.)
Scrappy - Oct 09, 2007 6:21:19 pm PDT #4169 of 28222
Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
Oh, Cor, I am Skimmy McSkimmerpants, and I bow my head in shame before you.
Hayden - Oct 09, 2007 6:57:35 pm PDT #4170 of 28222
aka "The artist formerly known as Corwood Industries."
Oh, I know how it is. I'm just so much noirish background blather to you. Like Edward G. Robinson playing Charlie Brown's teacher.
DavidS - Oct 09, 2007 7:02:02 pm PDT #4171 of 28222
"Look, son, if it's good enough for Shirley Bassey, it's good enough for you."
Like Edward G. Robinson playing Charlie Brown's teacher.
"MWOMP WOMP WOMP, See?"
megan walker - Oct 09, 2007 7:42:26 pm PDT #4172 of 28222
"What kind of magical sunshine and lollipop world do you live in? Because you need to be medicated."-SFist
I understood that Roman Noir preceded Film Noir as a coinage, because American hard-boiled novelists were packaged in black covered books in France.
True, but not by much. The term film noir was first used in 1946, partly for the way they were shot, but mostly due to coming on the tail of the Série noire novels, which Gallimard started publishing in 1945.
Good to know the dissertation's good for something...