Noirboiled Notes

I still don ’t know what this is all about. Please, will you stop being a woman?           P. J. Wolfson           Is My Flesh of Brass? ...

Entertaining (as always) but second-rate Dortmunder. This time out, Dortumunder is blackmailed into trying to steal a seemingly unstealabl...

elaborately unaware of the noise           Harry Whittington           Call Me Killer           1951

Watch Your Back! belongs at the bottom of the top tier of Dortmunder novels. Lightweight but exquisitely plotted, the novel concerns, i...

How do you know that, deep down, an abortionist is a good guy? When he charters a plane in bad weather to fly across country to perform a...

I’m not Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. I’m thirty-four and I’ve been married twice.           Charles Williams           Aground       ...

there ain’t nothin’ as aggravatin’ to live with as a disillusioned hawg           Charles Williams           Uncle Sagamore and His...

Amnesia Noir meets Noir Cop. Our amnesiac, of course, cannot remember whether he actually killed that guy, while our Noir Cop clings to hi...

To see him is to wanna not see him.           Donald E. Westlake           The Road to Ruin           2004

Aground  is the sixteenth Charles Williams novel that I have read, and it is my least favorite. I found the characters flat (even by stand...

Don’t fire, men, until you see the roots of their hair.           Charles Williams           Man on the Run           1958 

The second of Charles Williams’ two novels chronicling the adventures of peckerwood savant Sagamore Noonan, as seen through the eyes of hi...

I have such a beautiful love for myself— and the sweet part of it is— no rivals.           Raymond Chandler           The ...

11 Dortmunders down, 3 to go. By now I know that I enjoy the Dortmunder formula, and I thoroughly enjoyed  The Road to Ruin , but this may...

She was like a wind-walloping pennant flickering and buffeting back against its flagstaff.           Cornell Woolrich           Hotel...

The thesis of Cornell Woolrich’s Hotel Room is that “hotel rooms . . . are a lot like people”: they begin new and optimistic, and then ...

If you put your lips to a police badge, you only get a cold feeling back, and if you stroke a .38-caliber revolver, the .38-calibe...

Expanded from the novelette “Four Bars of Yankee Doodle” (1945),  Strangler’s Serenade  (1951) is Cornell Woolrich running out of gas. ...

When you have nothing inside you, you feel everything more, and you feel you can control all of it.          Megan Abbott...

Funny to be in this neighborhood in the daytime.           Donald E. Westlake           Don’t Ask           1993

What could be more perfect than an armored car? It’s stinking with money and it’s got wheels on it.      Elliott Chaze  ...

all the logic of gonorrhea in a convent      Charles Williams      Girl Out Back      1958

Unless his testes were regularly evacuated, they became the seat of his central nervous system and sent throughout his body venomous co...

This review is unfair to Thomas Berger’s Sneaky People , as it is a function of my genre expectations rather than the actual quality of ...

He clenched his teeth. He’d like to get her to dance for him, you know? Yeah. Then give it to her solid. Then the rest. And when...

The undertaker’s eyes always look like they’re measuring you for a coffin, and the astronaut’s eyes are always looking up to the sky...

sex with needles           Motörhead           “Be My Baby”           2006

There’s point driving the getaway car if nobody’s going to get away.           Donald E. Westlake           Bad News           2001 ...

A little man— a clerk or a butcher— he can hide for a while, but a guy so dumb he can only make dough writing words on paper— he ain’t ...

An excellent Dortmunder in which Westlake succumbs to his weakness for low-hanging fruit only when he has to name law firms. (Kleinberg, R...

I loved her like a rabbit loved a rattlesnake.           James M. Cain           Double Indemnity           1943

don’t run when nobody’s chasing you           Charles Williams           Man on the Run           1958 

Nice old ladies poison whole families. Clean-cut kids commit multiple holdups and shootings. Bank managers with spotless rec...