About raptnrent: I got the name from my keys - R Apt and R Ent for the back door to my apartment and the back door to the house. I liked that they were also words: Rapt, meaning enthralled, riveted, captivated, and Rent, meaning torn asunder, violently wrenched. I thought it made for an interesting juxtaposition, open to all kinds of interpretations.
Tag Archives: hardboiled
The Set-Up: Round two
Last week I blogged a bit about the film version of The Set-Up, so I thought I should take the time to read the book. The book and the film have similarities and differences, which Jefferson Hunter detailed far better than … Continue reading
True crime
Last semester I played along with Jim Groom’s hardboiled detective fiction course at UMW. After all the fun we had with that course, we’re looking at exploring crime reporting in America from colonial era execution sermons through classic true crime (In … Continue reading
Hollywoodboiled
I came to hardboiled fiction from a few different angles. I grew up reading comic books, so the jump from things like The Shadow and Robert E. Howard comics to pulp fiction to detective stories is practically inevitable. Another thing … Continue reading
More wikiness
Writing for Wikipedia is a challenge. When we write as students, it’s all about: What does the teacher want? What will make him/her happy so I’ll get a good grade? Whereas with an encyclopedia it’s all about: What will be … Continue reading
The Big Blow
It’s too bad time constraints knocked The Big Blowdown off the reading list. It makes a nice closing book because of the way it connects to so many of the others, from echoing minute details (“The Doc put fire to a … Continue reading
Somebody’s Top Ten + 4
I noticed that Devil in a Blue Dress showed up on someone’s list of the fourteen best private eye novels of all time. I have no idea why they decided to choose fourteen, or who they polled. It’s nice that … Continue reading
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Tagged Chandler, devilinabluedress, hammett, hardboiled, mosley, paretsky, redharvest
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I want you to see the bullet coming.
I listened to Devil in a Blue Dress on CD rather than read it. I think you lose something doing it that way – it’s a different kind of experience. As I wrote before, the narrator becomes part of the … Continue reading
What a tangled web we weave
I love what the group has to say about The Black Dahlia. Brenna brought up the Joker connection, which was brilliant, but also pointed out the two-cop connection to Cotton Comes to Harlem. Sarah went into detail about the real … Continue reading
Wiki editing
I thought it might be helpful to look at the editing process for Wikipedia and see what kind of information they need for references. I looked at the page for Sara Paretsky, and noticed that it made no mention of … Continue reading
That’s Balto.
There’s a little post-it stuck in my copy of The Black Dahila on the page where Bleichert first goes to the Sprague mansion and gets introduced to Balto. It says, “people who are not like us.” What kind of a … Continue reading