One Deadly Summer - Sebastian Japrisot

I watched the French film One Deadly Summer starring Isabelle Adjani and it stayed with me. There’s something about that story that doesn’t let go, a quiet unease that lingers long after it ends.

So I looked up the novel of the same name by Sébastien Japrisot.

As you may have known, it's a story of a young girl Elle who seeks revenge on three men that raped her mother years ago in one winter day.

The first half of the novel is very good. The atmosphere is dense, the characters feel real, and the story moves in a direction that promises a lot. There’s that slow, summery feeling with something dark underneath.

But as the novel goes on, it becomes strange. As if it starts to fall apart from within.

It increasingly feels like this is not just a story about one girl, but about a tragedy passed down from generation to generation. Something that cannot be avoided, only repeated.

The saddest part is what happens to Elle. It’s as if she retreats back into childhood, losing touch with reality, until she eventually ends up in a mental institution.

In the end, it feels like everything was predetermined.

James Ellroy - White Jazz

With White Jazz, the final entry in the L.A. Quartet, James Ellroy pushes his experimental style to the extreme.

The fragmented prose, already present in the earlier books, becomes almost overwhelming here. Sentences are cut, thoughts are compressed, and the narrative often feels chaotic and disjointed. At times, it works. At other times, it feels forced and unnecessarily psychedelic.

The plot revolves around Dave Klein investigating a break-in connected to a deeply disturbed family. The father is a major drug dealer, the daughter is a prostitute, and the son appears to be obsessively attached to her. This alone creates a sense of moral decay that is typical of Ellroy, but the novel doesn’t stop there.

Another subplot follows a runaway actress connected to Howard Hughes, portrayed here as a deeply unwell figure. She ends up acting in a low-budget film produced by Mickey Cohen, who is depicted as a fallen man reduced to working with alcoholics and fringe figures. These elements add to the sense of a collapsing world, where everyone is compromised and nothing feels stable.

As the novel progresses, the narrative becomes increasingly difficult to follow. Characters blur together, motivations become unclear, and it often feels like no one fully understands what they are doing — including the reader. The story turns into a kind of fever dream, driven more by sensation than by logic.

This is Ellroy at his most extreme: dirty, chaotic, and completely unrestrained. For some readers, this will be the ultimate expression of his style. For others, it may feel like excess without control.

In the end, White Jazz is less a traditional crime novel and more a descent into narrative breakdown — a book where structure collapses under the weight of its own intensity.

James Ellroy - The Big Nowhere

Out of all the novels in L.A. Quartet, The Big Nowhere is the one that impressed me the most.

The novel opens with a notorious wave of anti-communist witch hunting in America. This storyline, investigated by Malcolm Considine, is interesting in itself, especially once Buzz Meeks enters the picture. Still, for me, this is not the true core of the novel.

The heart of the book lies in the investigation of a serial killer, followed by Danny Upshaw. His character stood out the most. Not only because of the disturbing and brutal nature of the murders, but also because of the way his personal life slowly collapses as he becomes entangled in both the homicide case and the anti-communist purge.

Upshaw is a tragic figure. His involvement in the investigation of communist organizations only deepens his internal conflict, leading to an inevitable and devastating end. Ellroy builds his character with a sense of doom that feels unavoidable from the very beginning.

Reading James Ellroy is like stepping into a filthy bar late at night — a place filled with outcasts, criminals, corrupt policemen, and constant noise. There is no comfort, no elegance, only decay and tension. The prose is fragmented, aggressive, and relentless, pulling the reader deeper into a world where morality is blurred and violence is everywhere.

What makes The Big Nowhere effective is not just its plot, but its atmosphere. Ellroy doesn’t suggest darkness — he throws you into it. The novel is crowded with characters and subplots, but at its best, it delivers moments of pure noir intensity, especially through Upshaw’s storyline.

Even if Ellroy’s style can become exhausting, this novel shows him at his strongest: obsessive, chaotic, and completely uncompromising.

Lioner White - Too Young To Die/The Time Of Terror

I grew accustomed to reading Lionel White as a writer of heist novels about doomed men. His characters are usually trapped in situations where everything is carefully planned, yet there is always a sense that things will fall apart. Still, as a reader, I keep hoping that their schemes will somehow prevail.

Too Young to Die offers an interesting variation on this formula. At its center is a heist mastermind who unexpectedly falls in love with a young girl. This emotional element gives the novel a different tone and, at times, it reminded me of those paranoid crime stories from the 1970s, where relationships are fragile and constantly threatened by violence and distrust.

To cut the story short, the plan inevitably collapses. During a shootout, the girl is wounded and later dies in a remote hideaway, while the protagonist ends up surrounded by relentless, almost western-like lawmen. The final act has a fatalistic quality that feels both inevitable and fitting, reinforcing White’s recurring theme: no matter how clever the plan, the outcome is already sealed.

The second novel, The Time of Terror, is also strong, though in a different way. It follows a man who has lost everything — his job, his family — and decides to kidnap a young boy. The premise is simple, but effective, driven more by desperation than calculation. As in many of White’s works, the tension comes not from elaborate plotting but from watching a man unravel under pressure.

What makes White stand out is his ability to combine straightforward prose with a persistent sense of doom. Unlike more stylistically ambitious writers, he doesn’t rely on atmosphere or psychological introspection as much, but he understands structure and pacing. His novels move quickly, yet always toward the same destination: failure.

In that sense, White delivers exactly what I expect from him — stories about men who plan, hope, and act, only to discover that their fate was decided long before the first move.

Harry Whittington - A Ticket To Hell/Hell Can Wait

When I first heard about Harry Whittington, he was often mentioned alongside the great pulp and noir writers of the 1950s. His name appeared in Stark House reprints and in discussions about forgotten crime fiction authors who supposedly deserved rediscovery. Naturally, I expected something raw, atmospheric, maybe in the tradition of David Goodis or Charles Willeford.

After reading the Stark House edition containing Ticket to Hell and Hell Can Wait, I was surprised – and not in a good way.

Ticket to Hell starts with an intriguing premise: a drifter arrives at a remote motel and saves a young woman from her violent boyfriend who seems ready to kill her. This setup suggests a tense, morally ambiguous noir story. However, the novel quickly shifts into something much more conventional when it is revealed that the protagonist is actually working for the FBI and is on a mission to rescue a kidnapped boy. What begins as a potentially gritty, personal story turns into a predictable crime thriller filled with clichés and familiar plot turns.

The second novel, Hell Can Wait, follows a man who plans revenge against the driver responsible for a car accident that killed his wife. Revenge stories are a staple of crime fiction, but here the execution feels mechanical and uninspired. The characters lack psychological depth, and the plot unfolds in the most expected way possible, without the moral complexity or stylistic flair that defines the best noir fiction.

What disappointed me most was not just the use of clichés, but the overall flatness of the prose. Where writers like Goodis or Woolrich create atmosphere through mood, desperation, and poetic bleakness, Whittington’s writing in these two novels feels functional and rushed, as if produced to meet a deadline rather than to tell a compelling story. The dialogue is serviceable but rarely memorable, and the emotional stakes never feel fully real.

This is not to say that Whittington had no talent or that all of his work is without merit. Like many pulp writers of his era, he wrote quickly and prolifically, often under pressure from publishers. In that sense, he can be seen more as a professional craftsman than an artist. Still, based on Ticket to Hell and Hell Can Wait, it is difficult to place him in the same category as the truly distinctive voices of mid-century crime fiction.

Stark House deserves credit for keeping these books in print, as they provide a window into the vast landscape of mid-century pulp publishing. But as literature, these two novels serve more as historical curiosities than as forgotten masterpieces waiting to be rediscovered.

For readers exploring classic noir today, Whittington might be of interest for completists or for those curious about the broader pulp ecosystem. However, those looking for the emotional intensity of Goodis, the psychological precision of Highsmith, or the stylistic elegance of Chandler may find these novels surprisingly hollow.

In the end, reading Ticket to Hell and Hell Can Wait was a useful reminder that not every rediscovered pulp author is an overlooked genius. Sometimes, a hack is simply a hack – and even that has its place in the history of crime fiction.

Charles Willeford - Hoke Moseley Omnibus

Charles Willeford is often described as a kind of “Philip K. Dick of crime fiction.” Just as Philip K. Dick created strange, off-kilter worlds in science fiction, Willeford brings bizarre situations and unusual characters into the crime novel, often subverting the expectations of the genre.

The series about detective Hoke Moseley is particularly interesting in that respect.

Miami Blues is perhaps the best-known novel in the series, largely because of the unforgettable villain Frederick Junior Frenger. He is one of those criminals who seems completely unpredictable and dangerous, which gives the novel both energy and dark humor.

New Hope for the Dead was somewhat less interesting to me. Much of the plot revolves around old unsolved cases that Moseley has to reopen, and the pace therefore feels slower than in the first novel.

I liked Sideswipe the most. The premise itself is unusual: Moseley suddenly decides to move into a hotel run by his father in order to get away from everything for a while. At the same time another storyline unfolds involving a bizarre group of characters planning a supermarket robbery: a psychopathic small-time criminal, a confused retiree who no longer knows what to do with his life, a prostitute with a disfigured face, and a Black painter. This strange combination of characters gives the novel an almost grotesque tone.

The Way We Die Now is also good, particularly because of Moseley’s undercover assignment and the interesting character of a former convict who, after being released from prison, moves into a house across the street from him.

What I would criticize is Willeford’s somewhat dry writing style. Also, the edition I read from Orion Books is a paperback, which is not ideal for a book of more than 800 pages—something of that length would have been much better in hardcover.

Andrew Spicer - European Film Noir

I had high expectations from European Film Noir by Andrew Spicer, hoping for a broad and illuminating exploration of noir across the continent. Instead, the book mostly confirmed something I was already aware of: outside France, the European noir landscape is relatively limited.

The chapters on Germany, Spain, and Italy underline how few fully realized noir films emerged from those countries. While this may be historically accurate, it makes the study feel somewhat thin. The section on French noir is solid, but for anyone already familiar with the major films and critical discussions, it offers little that feels new or revelatory.

Another drawback is the book’s visual presentation. For a study devoted to a highly stylized cinematic form, it contains surprisingly few photographs. The overall design is rather plain and unattractive, which is disappointing in a book about a visually driven genre.

In the end, European Film Noir works better as an introductory academic survey than as a visually rich or groundbreaking reassessment of the genre. For readers already immersed in noir history, it may feel more dutiful than exciting.

Amanda Cross - Death In A Tenured Position

Death in a Tenured Position is a crime novel written by Amanda Cross, the pseudonym of literature professor Carolyn Heilbrun.

The novel tells the story of the first woman to receive a tenured position at a formerly all-male college. Instead of triumph, she is met with indifference, passive aggression, and institutional coldness. The mystery element is present, but atmosphere dominates — a pervasive sense of isolation, academic vanity, and quiet cruelty. In the end, it is revealed that her death was not a murder but a suicide, which casts the entire narrative in a darker and more unsettling light.

Heilbrun herself was a distinguished scholar and feminist critic who taught for many years at Columbia University. Throughout her academic career, she spoke openly about the subtle and overt discrimination women faced within universities, particularly in elite institutions that were slow to accept women as intellectual equals. Under the name Amanda Cross, she used detective fiction not only as entertainment but as a vehicle to explore gender politics, professional exclusion, and the emotional cost of institutional resistance.

Late in life, Heilbrun chose to end her own life at the age of seventy-seven. While it would be simplistic to read the novel as autobiographical, the themes of isolation, aging, autonomy, and the pressures placed upon accomplished women inevitably resonate more strongly in light of her personal history.