Author: Mike Lipinski

Born in Tel Aviv, Israel (when it was still Palestine, a British protectorate. I was 1 year old when we moved to England, where I grew up. At age 12, we left for Canada and I've lived here ever since.

This Gun For Hire

Guns for Hire?

I’m a great pulp fiction/Noir fan, but I’d never heard of This Gun For Hire, because it sounded like an ad for a hitman. The original title of the novel by Graham Greene that inspired the film, published before World War Two, was A Gun for Sale. The revised title certainly got my attention. A title has to be catchy and should  encapsulate the essential theme or point of the story. In this case, it sounds like it’s about a man who advertises his availability as a hitman.

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The Saint Steps In

 

Well, he certainly stepped into my life. As a matter of fact, I don’t remember asking him into my life at all. One day the Saint just appeared at my door and walked into my writer’s study and never left.  To do justice to my stated theme, pulp fiction, I couldn’t very well ignore Leslie Charteris’ The Saint,

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Pulp Fiction And Film Noir

An early edition of the other James M. Cain novel that obtained notoriety

For the benefit of those who aren’t sure of the definition or scope of pulp fiction, I want to point out that pulp fiction is not one genre, but several.  Overall, pulp fiction can be further broken down into sub-catergories, such as horror, fantasy, men’s adventure stories. My interest is primarily in the novels that were developed into motion

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Bad Girls of Film Noir

Who were the most memorable bad girls of Noir? There were many. A movie that comes to my mind immediately, is Sudden Fear. Perhaps not the most known film of the genre, it shows Gloria Grahame in great form here as a really nasty, nasty, nasty person, who teams up with an equally nasty man (Jack Palance) to kill the unwitting Joan Crawford for her money. In Too Late for Tears, Lizbeth Scott is the main character in a tangled tale of cold-blooded immorality and murder.

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