Negotiating With the Living and the Dead: Justina Ireland’s Ophie’s Ghosts

When young Ophelia “Ophie” Harrison woke in the middle of the night to her father’s warnings about danger coming to her home, she did not realize her mother could not see or hear him. It wasn’t until later, when she learned that he’d been killed earlier in the evening by the very men who then […]

Off the Record, On the QT, and Very Hush-Hush: L. A. Confidential (1997)

Three cops from very different worlds find their trajectories colliding when a power vacuum in the underworld triggers a series of events that shake the city of angels. Bud White (Russell Crowe) is an enforcer, a tough guy with a badge and a beef with women beaters. His partner Dick Stensland (Graham Beckel) tolerates this […]

Guilty Conscience: Ladies in Retirement (1941)

Ellen Creed (Ida Lupino) has a pretty good job tending house for the retired Leonora Fiske (Isobel Elsom). Ellen is not a lady of means, and her current situation is thrown into jeopardy when a letter arrives informing her that her sisters must be removed from their current living conditions. With a bit of persuasion […]

In Days of Auld De’il: Catherine Cavendish’s The Haunting of Henderson Close

Although it is nowhere near as famous as France’s catacombs, Edinburgh has an underground city. It wasn’t always so, of course, getting buried over time by newer developments. However, the Old Town’s buildings are still there, tucked away beneath the cleaner, modern surface streets. The place has quite the history, and of course it is […]

The Bringer of Wisdom and Its Accompanying Woe: Charles R. Saunders’ Damballa

In the paeon of pulp literature we find the precursors to the modern superhero craze in figures of mystery like The Shadow, The Spider, Doc Savage, and the occasional femme fatale like Domino Lady. Although those characters originally appeared in magazines and on radio dramas back in the 1920s and 1930s, then maintained a readership […]

Murder and War: James Kestrel’s Five Decembers

When Joe McGrady pulls the case, it is not without strings. A Mexican groundskeeper has come to his boss terrified of a corpse found in the equipment shed where he sleeps, and the boss is a prominent man. Joe’s Captain, Beamer has several beefs with the detective: Joe hasn’t worked a homicide case on his […]

Hell Will Have No Surprises For You: The Devils

In the seventeenth century, the priest Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed) dared to seduce every woman who caught his fancy while also rebuking the efforts of Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) to pull apart his walled city’s fortifications and therefore make the city subservient to his own mad whims. Richelieu sought a way to bring Grandier down, […]

Glimpses of Heroism Amidst Horrific, Historic Tragedy: Rosewood

In 1923, the small town of Rosewood, Florida was shaken by festering hatreds in the neighboring town of Sumner reaching a boiling point. The residents of that town were familiar with the hatreds—Rosewood was a town where African Americans owned their own land and lived a decent life, while Sumner was poor and predominantly white—but […]

Manifest Nasty: Regina Garza Mitchell’s Shadow of the Vulture

One thing I appreciate about the line of Splatter Westerns from Death’s Head Press is how the books are wildly different from one another in terms of tone, subject, and storyline. These are all weird westerns of a sort, at least they tend to blend the horrific, the suspenseful, the mystery, and the western in […]

Dodging Bad Guys And Evil Eyes: Walter Mosley’s Fear of the Dark

Paris Minton and Fearless Jones return for a third (and to date final) adventure in Fear of the Dark. Their first book kicked off with a femme fatale arriving at Paris’ bookstore, turning him on and plunging him into danger. His friend Fearless Jones came along for the ride because that’s the kind of friend […]

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