Search Results for: who needs a hard boiled detective

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Solar Pons – Who Needs a Hard Boiled Detective?

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Solar Pons has already made several appearances here in The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes. And previously, I wrote that Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe is my favorite detective series of them all. So naturally, I found a way to link them together into one post. Barely. Now, August Derleth was a born-and-raised Wisconsin boy, enamored with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of the great Sherlock Holmes. He wasn’t much different than an awful lot of American youths in the nineteen…

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A Fun Hardboiled Ride with Classic Barron Horror: The Wind Began to Howl by Laird Barron

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The Wind Began to Howl (Bad Hand Books, May 16, 2023). Cover by Mayra Fersner Laird Barron has been one of most exciting authors and one of the freshest voices in horror literature for several years now. His amazing short story collections include The Imago Sequence (2007), Occultation and Other Stories (2010), The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All and Other Stories (2013), as well as novels such as The Light Is the Darkness (2012) and the incredibly creepy The…

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Appaloosa – Hardboiled Western

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You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun) I enjoy a good Western on the screen. Tombstone is my favorite, with Rio Bravo not too far behind. And I usually watch at least a little if it’s got Randolph Scott or Joel McCrea…

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Some Hardboiled Streaming Options

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun) Today, I’m going to talk about two streaming sites for your hardboiled/noir lock down needs. And then, a third site with a show I really dig. First, up: WATCH TCM I have recently spent a…

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Mixing Hardboiled Film Noir and Magic: Cast a Deadly Spell

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Cast a Deadly Spell stars Fred Ward, Julianne Moore, and David Warner Director: Martin Campbell; Writer: Joseph Dougherty HBO 1991. 1 hours 36 minutes Philip Lovecraft (Fred Ward) is a hardboiled Los Angeles private eye who is hired by Amos Hackshaw (David Warner) to find the Necronomicon, a book which contains the knowledge to destroy the world when the stars line up at midnight in two days. It was stolen from Hackshaw by his ex-chauffer, Larry Willis (Lee Tergesen).

Sword Noir: A Role-playing Game of Hardboiled Sword & Sorcery

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Imagine Conan in Shadizar, meeting with a beautiful woman calling herself Fortuna who pays him to find Thuris, the man who kidnapped her younger sister. Conan accepts the woman’s coin but finds himself in the middle of double and triple crosses as Fortuna — known as Brigid the Bold in the underworld — seeks for the Falcon of Maltus along with her betrayed confederates, Jubliex Cairo, Wilmer the Younger, and Gutmar. Think of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser hired by…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Talking About Nero Wolfe

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I’m writing this in the aftermath of hosting a sleepover for my son and three of his eight-year old friends. My state is…I don’t know what it is, but it’s not normal. I’ve been reading a lot of Nero Wolfe-related stuff lately, so I’ll riff on that. Speaking of the gargantuan detective, I wrote about him earlier here at Black Gate. Back in September, I’m sure you read my post, “Who Needs a Hard Boiled Detective?” It looked at how, during…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: 2015 Links Compendium

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So, for the first post of 2016, I think the most important thing to recognize is that I made it to the end of my second calendar year at Black Gate without getting axed (it helps that I work cheap. As in, ‘free.”). By my reckoning, The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes has appeared here every single Monday morning for the past 96 weeks. As I had serious doubts that John O’Neill would even approve  a Holmes-themed column (I mean,…

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in September

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Jay Maynard’s “A Proposal: An Award for SF Storytelling” was the most popular post on Black Gate last month. It’s been read over 30,000 times since September 10th, and garnered nearly 500 comments. If there’s a topic BG readers really care about, it’s clearly SF awards. The #2 post on the list was our look at the breakout success of Cixin Liu’s novel The Three-Body Problem, the first Chinese-language novel to win the Hugo Award. #3 was Guy Windsor’s very…

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Galactic War, Haunted Farmhouses, and an Occupied Earth: September-October Print Magazines

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September-October 2024 issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction & Fact, and the Summer issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Cover art by Shutterstock, NASA, and Mondolithic Studios The big news this month is the arrival of the new issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, after a nearly 8-month hiatus. In the pages of the new issue, publisher Gordon van Gelder reports that “Ongoing production problems have led us to skip the Spring issue…

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