I used to write dark fantasy before I switched over to crime. Horror fiction, I tell them, is mostly a young person’s game. Where you get to dream up the monsters that are waiting ahead of you, around the next corner. Crime, on the other hand, is an older soul’s game. It’s about the demon that’s coming up behind you. It’s about all your regrets and mistakes that have brought you to the place where you are right now. It’s noir. It’s black. It’s bleak. It’s standing in your own overgrown yard with weeds up to your nuts, staring across the street at Boo Radley’s place, dreaming dark dreams, and waiting for Halloween. Maybe I’ll still be here by the end of October, or maybe kids will be daring each other to run up to an empty house where, in my worst nightmares, my shadow still walks, alone and in silence.

–From Tom Piccirilli’s column over at Mulholland Books

While pursuing another line of thought I found this line in an interview with Walter Hill. It’s an interesting and succinctly stated idea. But is he right? (bolding is mine)

Somebody once asked me why I never did horror films, just action, and what was the difference? I said horror movies terrorize women, and action movies terrorize guys. For some reason, several people found that definition objectionable. (chuckling) I thought it was brutally accurate…

–Walter Hill

DT: I walked on that movie set as a drug counselor. I was helping this kid I was counseling. He called me up and said, “Hey, there’s a lot of blow down here.” It was 1985, and cocaine was running rampant in the movie industry. It was crazy. You’d walk into production and there’d be lines on the table. He just asked me to come down and support him, because that’s what I did. I still do it. I’m going over on an intervention right now to one of our Hollywood actors. I went onto this movie set, and he was a PA, and I thought it was cute. I had never been on a movie set in my life. All these guys were dressed up as inmates, and they were all trying to act tough. They all had these fake tattoos. I kept smearing these tattoos. I had to say, “Oh shit, I’m sorry. That stuff smears.”

This guy asked me if I wanted to be in a movie, and I said, “What do I gotta do?” And he said, “Do you want to be an extra?” And I said, “An extra what?” And he said, “Can you act like a convict?” I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever heard. I’d been in every penitentiary in the state. I looked at him and I said, “Well, I’ll give it a shot.” He gave me a blue shirt, and I took off my shirt, and I have that big tattoo on my chest. He said “Leave your shirt off.” Then this other guy comes over and says, “Hey, you’re Danny Trejo. I saw you win the lightweight and welterweight title up in San Quentin.” And I go, “Yeah. You’re Eddie Bunker.” I had been in prison with him. And he was a writer. We started talking, and he asked, “Are you still boxing?” And I go, “Well, I still train.” And he said, “Do you want a job? We need someone to train one of the actors how to box.” And I said, “I got a job. They’re going to give me 15 bucks for acting like a convict. What’s this pay?” He said, “It pays $320 a day.” So I said, “How bad do you want this guy beat up? Shit, for 320 bucks—” And he goes, “No, you have to be really careful, this actor’s really high-strung. He’s already socked a couple of people.” I said, “For $320, man, give him a stick. I’ll fight Godzilla for 320 bucks.” I started training Eric Roberts how to box. Eric wanted to learn how to box, and I think he was scared of me, so he’d do whatever I told him to do. Andrey Konchalovskiy, the director, saw that he would do whatever I told him to do. I guess Andrey had some problems with it. So Andrey comes over and hires me. He says, “You be in the movie. You fight Eric in the movie.” And that’s where it started. From that day until right now, I’ve got 183 movies.

–Danny Trejo

Truthfully the whole interview is filled with great quotes “God, Danny, where did you study”

Hey, I’m no prude and there’s a place for language in all it’s manifestations. I’ll say effing as fast as anyone if I stub my toe. But Pete Dragovich is just plain a garbage mouth. There’s no reason for the language, it’s not justified by the content or meaning, it’s just there to smear up what might have otherwise been a pretty good review.

Sure, he has the right to write and say what he wants. I have the right to say I don’t like it. No flaming here, just my opinion.

–From Patti Abbott’s blog

Peter Dragovich is Spinetingler’s very own The Nerd of Noir

Nerd here.  Noel Murray of the AV Club had some shit to say about the endings of genre fiction in his piece on the last episode of Lost.  Check it out:

Let’s talk about endings.

I was chatting with a fellow TV critic a couple of weeks ago and told her that when it comes to the majority of genre fiction, I like the first four-fifths of any story far more than the finish. I love detective fiction and policiers, but once Harry Bosch or whoever puts all the pieces together and stands gun-to-gun with the bad guy, my eyes tend to glaze. (It’s the same reason I stopped doing Sudoku puzzles after a while; once I did the hard work early on, the rest felt too much like accounting.) With dramas and comedies—especially those that are more slice-of-life—often the ending is all, and where the author chooses to punctuate is the ultimate indicator of what the story is all about. But fantasies, adventures… these types of stories frequently get their ideas out of the way early, to clear a space at the end for action.

 Here’s the rest of the piece.

Coincidence has no place in twenty first century writing. It’s actually a worse device for solving plot problems than the supernatural and I hate the supernatural in fiction. Magic explains and excuses everything but coincidence is still a higher category of crime because it only works if the audience or reader is not paying attention: coincidence assumes that you, the paying punter, are really really stupid.

–Adrian McKinty

Essentially, in the traditional comics, the requirements are a lot of Wham! — and a lot more Bam! — but the “Thank you, Ma’am” is strictly forbidden.

–Don McGregor, from one of the reprint articles in the IDW reprint hardcover of Detectives Inc.

There’s a central paradox in Greek tragedy, which is this: the tragic hero brings about his own downfall because of some terrible flaw or fracture in his own nature – pride, or lust, or moral blindness. But at the same time, he’s destroyed because the gods, or some subset of the gods, decided to stitch him up good and proper. Fate and hubris go hand in hand. So destiny gets to pull the trigger , but you pretty much have to paint the target on your own chest first – and the horror of your downfall is precisely equal to the scale of your fuck-up. Ordinary mortals watch and wonder.

–Mike Carey, from the introduction to Greek Street: Blood Calls for Blood by Peter Milligan & Davide Gianfelice

“I’m not in the business of validating people’s preconceptions and stroking their mindset and giving them an hour and a half of diversion. I like to rock. I like to get in there and fuck with their heads.”

–Paul Schrader