Balls to the Wall
[openbook booknumber="1400032873"] I started reading James Ellroy's Destination: Morgue! (2004) this weekend, and I really can’t imagine a better author to lift your spirits when you are feeling down I...
View ArticleLana Turner
Lana Turner is always hardboiled! I wanted to title this one Johnny Stompanato —if you don’t know the story of Turner’s turbid relationship with the LA Underworld you should (James Ellroy writes them...
View ArticleHardboiled: Mildred Pierce Discussion (Part 2) & Midterm
Mildred and Veda Mildred Pierce Class Discussion (10-11-12) The class discussion covering the second half of James M. Caine’s Mildred Pierce from Thursday can be found above. Oddly enough I forgot my...
View ArticleHardboiled Week 14: James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia, and Other Twisted Obsessions
I can remember the exact moment I heard about James Ellroy for the first time. It was the Fall of 1994 and I was working at UCLA’s Audio Visual Services scheduling AV needs for the campus community...
View ArticleHardboiled Week 14: Black Dahlia, Alternative History, and the Rise of Smut...
Audio of Hardboiled discussion of James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia 11-29-2012 Tonight’s class was a bit low energy given how late we are in the semester and how much reading I have thrown at the...
View ArticleWhy so serious?
Image credit: Conrad Viedt from the 1928 adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel The Man Who Laughs This is my last word on James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia because I need to write about the re-emergence of...
View ArticleEllroy on Hammett: a Hardboiled War on Labor
I was searching the UMW library database for a James Ellroy novel I wanted to re-read this break (The Big Nowhere), when I stumbled across his introduction to an Everyman’s Library Edition of some of...
View ArticleMaybe I like to be cheap once in a while….
….maybe everybody does. The following scene is a classic Hollywood moment from Vincente Minnelli‘s 1952 melodrama The Bad and the Beautiful between Lana Turner and Kirk Douglas —and both prove why they...
View ArticleJack Webb’s “The Black Dahlia”
Jack Webb in character is Joe Friday on Dragnet Last night we had a pretty awesome True Crime class. The conversation was deftly led by Sara Akbari, Meredith Fiero, and Jack Harris; they did an awesome...
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