Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Buckle your seat belts! This is going to be a wild ride!
We take a deep dive into “Blacktop Wasteland” by SA Cosby, a novel we both describe as a modern classic.
Cosby takes us on a journey through the rural hills of Virginia in this exhilarating, timely work that highlights everything godo that modern noir crime fiction has to offer.
Get in touch with the show: pointblanknoir@gmail.com
Find us on Facebook and join our Facebook group: Point Blank: Hardboiled, Noir and Detective Fiction
Twitter: @pointblanknoir
Itunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/point-blank-hardboiled-noir-detective-fiction/id1276038868
Support the show: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pointblankcrime
Don’t forget to rate us on Apple Podcasts and share the show with your friends!
I was intrigued by your observation that noir is not stuck in history. BLACKTOP WASTELAND is not, as I recall, strictly contemporary. I think it takes place in 2012. But it’s certainly a long, long way from the thirties and forties, the temporal homeland of classic noir, and it does, in its very set-up, have a lot in common with its predecessors. I didn’t have to read far before I started to think of films like OUT OF THE PAST. Bug, like Mitchum, is a man with a past. He’s tried very hard to put it behind him, but when that past comes calling, circumstances force him to answer. So you’re right. No one period has full ownership of noir. But I myself prefer the forties as the classic hunting ground for noir tales. Perhaps I should have said, “breeding ground.” It was there, in 1947, in the rich, dank soil of Hollywood corruption, that the plot and characters of SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME, my own contribution to the genre, germinated and blossomed. That period, aside from its glamorous moral rot, has another serious advantage when it comes to the element of mystery: an absence of cell phones, omnipresent cameras, computerized crime reports, and DNA labs.