ClimbingSky

Why Baseball, Books, and the Grateful Dead matter

Hardboiled Crime Fiction

Book Reviews

  • On the Art of the Book Cover

    Some of my earliest and fondest “book-memories” are of the kind of paperback books my father and uncles used to read. The kind of books I would find on tables and shelves in various bunkhouses or in the”office” (trailer) at the city dump where my Uncle Carl used to work: westerns and detective fiction… cheap… Read more

  • Hardboiled Coffee Shot

    Flack went into his desk again, took out a fifth of bourbon, and poured some into his coffee. He grinned. “Wanna cheer yours up a little?” “No thanks.” I got up, “I’ll keep in touch, Julian.” Flack’s grin disappeared. “Don’t call me Julian. And watch your step. I got enough trouble without having you turn… Read more

  • SHORT STORY REVIEW: “As I Lay Dead” by Fletcher Flora

    I have mentioned here before that Noir and Hardboiled fiction are my guilty pleasures. The tough, cynical protagonists, the fast-paced, action oriented plots, the tone, the dialog, and the style all appeal to me in a way that no other fiction really does. Manhunt first appeared in 1952. According to information Here is some information… Read more

  • Hardboiled Coffee Technique

    The coffee maker was almost ready to bubble. I turned the flame low and watched the water rise. It hung a little at the bottom of the glass tube. I turned the flame up just enough to get it over the hump and then turned it low again quickly. I stirred the coffee and covered… Read more

  • Hardboiled Can of Coffee

    “Feel like breakfast?” he asked. “I could do things to a can of black coffee,” Steve admitted. “All right. But you’ll have to gulp it. Judge Denvir is waiting to get a crack at you, and the longer you keep him waiting, the tougher it’ll be for you.” (Hammett, Dashiell. Nightmare Town: Stories) Read more

  • Hardboiled Joe

    When she sat down on the stool next to me she nodded toward the counterman and said, “Shorty’s got a heart of steel, mister. Won’t even trust me for a cup of joe until I get a job. Care to finance me to a few vitamins?” I was too tired to argue the point. “Make… Read more

  • Hardboiled Java

    “Right up the street under the el was an all-night hash joint, and what I needed was a couple mugs of good black java to bring me around.” (Spillane, Mickey. My Gun is Quick.) Read more

  • Friday’s Food for Thought: On Dashiell Hammett

    In his famous 1944 essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler openly acknowledged Hammett’s genius. He properly credited him as “the ace performer,” the one writer responsible for the creation and development of the hard-boiled school of literature, the genre’s revolutionary realist. “He took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into… Read more

  • Book Review: “Find a Victim” by Ross Macdonald

    I first read Ross Macdonald in the late 80s or early 90s, after reading a lot of Hammett and Chandler. It was a natural progression. For as many have pointed out, Macdonald perfected the hardboiled detective  genre that Hammett invented and Chandler made literarily necessary. The protagonist of Ross Macdonald’s Southern California Noir work is… Read more

  • Coffee Noir

    I went out the kitchen to make coffee – yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The life blood of tired men. ― from The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler Read more